After a judge opened up a way to avoid Apple’s commission on their sales, companies big and small are seeing dollar signs.
Apple has taken to calling its iPhone App Store an “ economic miracle,” and it has pointed to developers like Zach Shakked as proof. Mr. Shakked created an iPhone app that helps companies find trending hashtags on social media. Over the past 12 months, his sales have topped $5 million. But one of Mr. Shakked’s largest expenses is paying a cut to the world’s richest company. In his case, Apple took nearly $1.5 million — its fee for letting him run his app on its devices. Now, Mr. Shakked has hope that he could soon keep at least some of that money. On Friday, a federal judge ordered Apple to allow developers to steer their customers off their iPhone apps to pay for their goods or services, which Apple had banned. That is big news for developers like Mr. Shakked because sales completed outside Apple’s payment systems are not subject to its commission of up to 30 percent. “It finally feels like the small guys got a win,” Mr. Shakked,25, said. “There’s a sense of justice.” The ruling, in Apple’s yearlong legal fight with Epic Games, the maker of the popular video game Fortnite, set off celebrations among app developers. From one-person start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, they have long complained about paying hefty cuts of their businesses to Apple. The impact of the decision will be most felt by the smallest developers like Mr. Shakked. He said the change could save him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, which would allow him to hire more employees. “It’s a very big deal,” said Denys Zhadanov, a board member at Readdle, which makes five productivity apps for tasks like email that together have been downloaded roughly 175 million times. The change could save his company millions of dollars each year, he said. The court fight has often been framed as a battle between industry heavyweights: Apple, which is worth $2.5 trillion, versus Epic, a far smaller company but still one of the few app makers capable of taking on the Silicon Valley titan.
