Britain’s competition regulator has decided that the cheapest place to buy a digital subscription should not be the one place an app is forbidden from mentioning. On Tuesday the Competition and Markets Authority proposed allowing UK app developers to steer users toward payment options outside Apple and Google’s stores, a change aimed squarely at the commissions that have made those stores so profitable.
The proposals would remove the restrictions that currently stop developers directing users to off-platform checkouts, a practice Apple bans outright and Google restricts.
The mechanism is modest on its face and consequential underneath: if a developer can put a link in its app that says payment is cheaper on the web, the 30% cut that anchors the mobile economy starts to look optional.
The CMA did not propose abolishing fees. It proposed disciplining them. Any charge the platforms levy for allowing such steering would have to be, in the regulator’s words, fair and reasonable, and lower than current app store commissions, with the savings passed on to consumers or reinvested in innovation.
The phrasing matters, because the history of these fights is largely a history of platforms replacing a banned fee with a differently named one of similar size.
