Ternus and the App Store
Mark Gurman (tweet, John Gruber, Mastodon, 9To5Mac):
The Schiller exit is a bit more notable. Unlike Maestri, he still had a real job: The veteran executive ran the App Store and Apple Events. The App Store portion alone is no joke. It generates an estimated $30 billion a year and can be very challenging to manage. Apple’s app marketplace is loved by many consumers, but often criticized by developers and subjected to increasingly onerous regulations. It was a busy, all-encompassing gig and nowhere near a semiretirement.
[…]
But there’s a bit more to the story, I’m told. Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.
“Product guy” dreams about margins, forgets that people buy Apple hardware because of the software.
Apple admitted during its July earnings call that regulatory changes have started to weigh on its Services growth. Apple reported services revenue of $30.7 billion for the June quarter, a record for the period but short of the $31.4 billion that analysts expected.
The hardware guys treating third-party developers like they do their suppliers has stifled Apple’s software platforms
I thought that perhaps with the move to John Ternus as CEO, it could also be an obvious time to revisit such policies. But I hadn’t considered that Apple could actually be in favor of making them more onerous.
See also: Mario Guzmán and Indie Simulator.
Previously:
- John Ternus Is CEO
- App Store Moves From Phil Schiller to Eddy Cue
- Apple Proposes 15% External Purchase Fee
- Apple’s Q3 2026 Results
- Apple Financial Statements: Products vs. Services
- Apple Services Price Hikes 2026
- Apple Hardware Price Hikes
- John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook
- MacBook Neo
- Testimony on External Purchase Fee and Scare Screens
- Tim Cook’s App Store Testimony
4 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
It’s perhaps unsurprising with the billions (trillions if measured over multiple years) of profit that the company rakes in, that Apple wasn’t actually going to think of the customers any more than the little they already do. Trainloads of money corrupts all thinking like that. The writing was on the wall 10 years ago, but now it’s almost assured that Apple will fade into a sea of gray, boring, rounded corners, just like every other tech company.
> people buy Apple hardware because of the software
The hardware has never been more locked down, non-upgradable, and now, uneconomical. If they neither improve their own first-party and platform software, while making business worse for third-party developers who treat MacOS as a dumping ground for electron (or leave), what point will there be in buying the hardware?
Not sure where we’ll end up. Desktop Linux? Sure the desktop environment sucks, but MacOS is regressing anyway, and hey at least on my commodity PC hardware I can upgrade the RAM from 32 GB to 64 GB without throwing the entire machine away.
I thought it was curious/notable that Schiller would step back immediately as the handoff started, I was optimistic on Ternus taking over from Cook, but cautious concern rising.
"Apple’s app marketplace is loved by many consumers..."
I'd like to know the supporting evidence for that statement by Gurman. I say that with no cynicism or sarcasm. I've never heard or read broad appreciation like that about the "app marketplace."
