Eddy Cue quietly became the most powerful executive at Apple

Phil Schiller leaving the App Store made Monday’s headlines. The quieter fact underneath it is that Eddy Cue now runs more of Apple than anyone except the new chief executive.

Mark Gurman broke the reshuffle for Bloomberg on Monday, hours before John Ternus took over. Apple has not announced any of it, and declined to comment.

Cue already ran services. He has since collected the App Store, Apple Arcade and, at the end of last year, Health.

Nobody announced that as a promotion. It arrived in pieces, each one attached to somebody else’s departure.

What moved, and to whom

The App Store goes back to the division that had it until 2015, when Schiller and the marketing department took over. Cue gets it after an 11-year gap, and gets it at the moment the store is worth more and is under more legal pressure than at any point in its history.

Carson Oliver runs it day to day and reports straight to Cue. Oliver has spent his whole 14 years at Apple in that department. Ann Thai, who handles distribution tools and third-party marketplaces, now reports to Oliver rather than to Schiller. So does Alex Rofman, who runs Apple Arcade.

Events went somewhere else entirely. Nola Weinstein, Schiller’s deputy on launches since 2023, takes that team. She reports to Kristin Huguet Quayle, Apple’s vice president of communications and public relations.

That is a quiet reclassification. Apple product launches sat under communications until about 2019, then spent seven years as a marketing function under Schiller. They are going back to the press office.

For a company whose launches are its most-watched output, deciding they belong to PR rather than to product marketing is not a small call.

The size of what Cue holds

Services brought in more than $109bn in Apple’s last full financial year, over a quarter of the company. It is the fastest-growing part of the business and the highest margin.

The App Store alone facilitated more than $1.4tn in transactions last year, by Apple’s own count, and Bloomberg puts its direct revenue above $30bn a year.

Jacob Eiting, who runs the subscriptions firm RevenueCat, made the point about scale from the other end. Schiller started on the App Store when it had no apps and no revenue. It now pays developers on the order of $100bn a year.

Cue takes all of that on top of a services division he had already spent a decade building.

The bench emptied first

Cue’s rise is partly a matter of who is left. Apple has lost or is losing most of the executives who ran it alongside Cook.

Jeff Williams retired as chief operating officer in December after 27 years. Dan Riccio, who ran hardware before Ternus, has gone. So has finance chief Luca Maestri, and Lisa Jackson, who handled environment and government affairs. General counsel Kate Adams and Apple Pay head Jennifer Bailey both leave in October. Paul Meade, who ran Vision Pro hardware, left for OpenAI in June.

TNW covered Bailey’s exit in August, when the executive who launched Apple Pay announced her retirement after 25 years.

Schiller is 66 and joined in 1987, with a four-year break in the middle. Gurman was blunt about what the move means: it is part of a retirement plan, and Schiller no longer runs any departments at Apple. He keeps the Fellow title and an advisory role.

Apple has updated his leadership page, and Cue’s, to match.

He had not been coasting in it either. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2024 that Schiller was still working close to 80 hours a week in what was already meant to be a step back.

Cue inherits the legal file too

Whoever runs the App Store runs Apple’s most contested product. TNW reported in June that the Supreme Court would hear Apple’s appeal against the contempt finding in the Epic case, and in August that Apple had replaced its EU Core Technology Fee with a flat 5% commission to settle its Digital Markets Act dispute.

That second change landed 13 days before Schiller stepped back, as TNW noted on Monday, along with the US ruling that found Schiller had argued internally for compliance and been overruled by Tim Cook.

Tim Sweeney, who has spent six years suing Apple over the store Cue now owns, marked the change publicly. He said he hoped Apple would look at the future as optimistically as he does, and grow by bringing computing to people rather than extracting more from them.

“This will be a new age for Apple,” Sweeney wrote.

What it signals about Ternus

Ternus is a hardware engineer. Every account of his appointment framed it as Apple returning to product after 15 years under an operations chief.

His first structural move went the other way. He handed more of the company to the executive who runs the subscription business, the content deals and now the store, while events went to the press office.

Cue has been at Apple since 1989 and has spent recent years talking up its ambitions in entertainment. He now has the App Store, Arcade, Health, TV and the rest of services under him.

That may be a reading of where the money is rather than a change of heart about products. Services is the growth line, and the App Store is the part of it under the most legal pressure.

Apple holds its first event of the Ternus era on 9 September, where a foldable iPhone is expected. Weinstein produces it. Cue owns the store the apps will run on.