[Breaking News] New Court Ruling Against Apple Regarding In-App Payments
Apple now has to allow links to external payments in iOS apps and can’t charge a fee for payments made externally. But, you’d still need to implement In-App Purchases (IAP).
In recent tech news that affects us mobile developers - Apple had a court ruling against it, on April 30th 2025, regarding enforcement of in-app purchases.
It’s a continuation of the Epic vs Apple battle that’s been going on since 2021.
Now, the court found Apple purposefully defying its ruling and ordered Apple to remedy it.
The remedy means that now Apple has to update its app store review guidelines to allow developers to link to external payment options outside of the app.
Originally, Apple only allowed their own In-App Purchases (IAP) to be used by developers if they wanted to sell to users directly through their own apps. After another court order, Apple begrudgingly allowed developers to link out to external payment methods, outside of their own apps, but mandated that developers who do that have to give Apple a cut of the revenue (27%) from the sales made this way.
In the latest court ruling, the judge found it to be unacceptable and ordered Apple to stop this and to allow developers to link to their own payment methods inside of their applications freely, without Apple charging any kind of fee for it.
Can I just have an external payment link in my app and drop IAP?
Some of you might rejoice and say “Yay! What a victory! I can finally use Stripe on my website and in my app!”. But there is a caveat - if you want to be able to charge your users from your app, either directly in it or by linking to an external payment page on your website, you’d still have to implement Apple’s In-App Purchases side-by-side with the external payment link. You cannot simply have a link to your own page and not provide IAP as a payment alternative along with it.
What you can do, though, is have unrestricted marketing, calls to action, and other messaging in your app and outside of it (via email and other means) for your own external page payment options. And also you can set different prices (lower for example) between your external link payment and IAP!
Can I roll out my own payment solution?
Another question developers might have - can I implement my own payment solution inside of the app instead of external links?
Apparently that is still prohibited. You can only use IAP to process payments in your app or have external links to process payments outside of your app.
Of course, just like before, let’s say you need to collect credit card info inside of your app for a physical good such as ecommerce store shipment, then it’s fair game to do so inside of your own app.
These new rules apply to US storefronts only!
This is a very important point to keep in mind - these new changes, allowance to link out to your own external payment, is only allowed for apps offered in the United States! Apps offered in other countries CANNOT use external links for payments.
In my personal opinion, this will soon change as regulations and/or court rulings in other countries will quickly catch up. But in the meantime this means that you’d need to use the user's location or have them enter their country of origin upon sign up or use other means to figure out if they are in the US or not and then dynamically display the external payment link at runtime or not.
But my app is just a companion app in my SaaS business! My users generally sign up on the website. What does it mean for me? What about seats and multi-user subscriptions?
Every typical SaaS company has this scenario - you have a subscription service that you offer, mainly your users use your website and subscribe through it, you also have a companion mobile app that users use on occasion (but the functionality in it, just like on your website, is enabled only upon subscription purchase). Can you now have a product led motion (PLG) where users finally are able to subscribe via your mobile app as well as via the website?
The answer is yes, you can link out to external payments now, have better call to actions and marketing messages, etc., but you still have to offer IAP as a payment option along with it.
Now, the major issue here is that with IAP you can’t really offer multi-seat purchase flow for your subscriptions, it simply does not have such functionality/features (like an option to select 5 seats/user as you go through subscription flow inside of IAP). I expect Apple will now have to compete with other payment providers more and will add that functionality someday, but that day might not be soon.
What you can do now is offer a single user/seat subscription to your iOS users via IAP and link out to your own external payment page for those who want to purchase multi-user/seat subscriptions. This way, you’re adhering to Apple’s rules about IAP and offering users full functionality through it but have an alternative for a multi-seat solution for the scenario that Apple literally can’t handle.
Conclusion
These changes are profound and will unlock a lot of positive changes in PLG and other strategies for a lot of companies. Unfortunately we can’t bypass implementing IAP, but despite the limitations and IAP requirement it’s likely most developers will be able to save some money on Apple fees and commissions and have more flexibility with their payment options.
I expect Apple to start to compete in this payments sphere more now as they will be forced to adapt and offer more compelling payment options (less fees, more features).
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Thanks for summarizing this.
“But, there's a catch: you still need to implement Apple's In-App Purchases (IAP) alongside any external payment links. And this rule currently applies only to apps in the US storefront. “
I don’t think this is true. I haven’t noticed any approved apps by Apple doing this, including Spotify or Amazon Kindle.