Apple formally objected to the UK Competition and Markets Authority’s proposed App Store conduct requirements on 30 July 2026, calling them “highly intrusive.” The CMA’s draft rules, out for consultation until 28 July, would require Apple to let developers link users to payment options outside the App Store, and cap the fee Apple can charge for that steering below its existing in-app commission — the CMA’s stated goal being that developers can pass savings on to customers or reinvest them. Apple’s submission argues this goes beyond promoting competition into direct price regulation of a private platform, and disputes that there’s evidence external steering would actually lower prices for customers. The CMA has pushed back publicly, saying its consultation “proposes principles to ensure fees are fair and reasonable, not to directly set prices,” and is now assessing responses before a final decision.
So what
Nothing is settled yet, but the direction of travel matters for anyone commissioning an iOS build with UK users. If the CMA’s steering rules land close to the current draft, apps with a meaningful transaction volume gain a real reason to build (or at least architect for) an external payment path — which has knock-on decisions for onboarding flow, receipt and refund handling, and how you present pricing across two payment surfaces instead of one. If Apple succeeds in narrowing the rules, that work becomes unnecessary. The sensible position for a founder scoping an iOS product this year isn’t to guess the outcome — it’s to build the payment layer with enough separation from the rest of the app that adding or removing an external steering flow later is a configuration change, not a rebuild. That’s the kind of platform decision we help clients think through before committing to an architecture, whether the build is iOS-native or cross-platform — get in touch if you’re scoping a UK-facing app and want to plan for this properly rather than retrofit it later.