For years, Apple’s App Store sold itself as the cleaner, safer corner of mobile life. You downloaded an app, tapped through Apple’s payment system, and trusted that the company had already screened out most of the junk. That setup felt simple for users, but it also meant Apple controlled the storefront, the rules, and the money moving through it.
Still, “complete dysregulation" works better as a headline than as a literal description. What happened in 2025 and 2026 wasn’t the end of App Store rules, but the steady collapse of Apple’s ability to write all of them by itself. Courts and regulators didn’t blow the walls off the iPhone, but they did force open some doors Apple had spent years keeping shut.
Payment Fight
The U.S. fight turned on a pretty basic question: if a court says developers can send users to outside payment options, can Apple make that option so awkward and expensive that almost nobody uses it? In the original 2021 injunction, Apple was barred from stopping developers from including “buttons, external links, or other calls to action” that send users to payment systems outside the App Store. This directly affected Apple’s anti-steering rules, which had kept developers boxed into Apple’s own checkout lane.
By April 2025, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said Apple had willfully violated that injunction. The district court said Apple had imposed new barriers, used full-page warning screens, static URLs, and generic statements to discourage outside purchases, and referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings were appropriate. The order also barred Apple, effective immediately, from impeding developers’ ability to communicate with users or levying a new commission on off-app purchases.
The court said Apple’s 27% commission had a prohibitive effect, and that its link-design restrictions violated the injunction by making outside purchasing harder to use. Those restrictions included a “Plain Button style,” tight limits on what links could say, and warning screens that popped up when users tried to leave the app to pay elsewhere.
That ruling changed what “choice” on iPhone actually meant in the U.S. Developers got much firmer legal ground to point users to web payments, and Fortnite came back to the U.S. App Store in May 2025 after nearly five years away. What didn’t happen, and this part matters, is a U.S. launch of the Epic Games Store on iPhone. That store launched for iPhones in the European Union, not in the United States.
Europe Opens Up
If the U.S. case was about payment links, Europe went after the wider structure of Apple’s control. On April 23, 2025, the European Commission said Apple had breached the Digital Markets Act’s anti-steering obligation and fined the company €500 million. The Commission’s position was straightforward: developers should be able to tell customers about better offers outside the App Store and send them there free of charge.
Apple’s own EU marketplace documentation shows how far that shift went, and how tightly Apple still tried to manage it. In the EU, iOS and iPadOS can now support alternative app marketplaces that install apps, manage purchases and subscriptions, and operate outside the standard App Store flow. At the same time, Apple still requires notarization, authorizes marketplace developers through a specific entitlement, and says those marketplace apps can only be installed from the marketplace developer’s website.
Even then, Europe didn’t turn into an anything-goes app free-for-all. Apple’s rules said marketplace operators had to either provide a €1,000,000 stand-by letter of credit or meet the alternative track record test, which meant being in good standing for two continuous years and having an app with more than one million first annual installs in the EU in the prior calendar year. So yes, Europe forced some openings, but Apple still wrapped those openings in a lot of conditions.
By June 2025, Apple said it would revise those EU business terms again and move toward a single business model by January 1, 2026, replacing the Core Technology Fee with the Core Technology Commission for digital goods and services. Europe also got something the U.S. still didn’t: Epic launched the Epic Games Store for iPhones there, and Epic said the launch was possible because of the DMA. That’s a much bigger crack in Apple’s old one-store model than some minor policy tweak buried in a developer update.
More Choice, More Friction
The pressure on Apple didn’t stop with Washington and Brussels. In South Korea, Apple says developers of apps distributed solely there can use a third-party payment provider, but Apple still charges a 26% commission on those transactions. In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority said on March 12, 2025, that mobile browser markets weren’t working well for consumers and businesses, which was holding back innovation, and Japan’s Mobile Software Competition Act was approved and passed on June 12, 2024.
Apple’s defense isn’t made up. In its 2025 fraud report, the company said it had prevented more than $9 billion in fraudulent transactions over the last five years, including more than $2 billion in 2024 alone, and that the App Store averages more than 813 million visitors a week. Apple argues that tighter control helps protect users from scams, shady billing, malicious apps, and a bunch of other messes nobody wants on their phone.
That’s what makes this moment feel messy in a way that’s pretty real, especially for gamers and heavy app users. More competition can mean more payment options, lower prices, and more room for alternative stores or indie distribution, but it can also mean more setup screens, more warnings, more confusing install paths, and more responsibility landing on the user. The iPhone app economy isn’t fully deregulated, as Apple still controls a lot, and the U.S. and EU are still operating on very different tracks. What’s changed is the bigger thing: courts and regulators have finally broken the idea that Apple alone gets to define competition, payments, and distribution on iOS.
