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.
The watchdog is also weighing a requirement that would reach beyond payments. It is considering forcing Apple to open access to the near-field communication chip that powers contactless payments, which would let developers build tap-to-pay features directly into iOS apps rather than routing everyone through Apple Pay.
That is the same competitive nerve regulators in Brussels have pressed, and it tends to provoke a sharper response from Apple than fee tweaks do.
The two companies arrive at the proposal from different positions. Google said it had already made the changes the CMA is describing, pointing to new Play Store terms introduced earlier this month that let developers send users off-platform to complete transactions, subject to some conditions, alongside changes to its fee structure.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment, which is consistent with a company that has fought steering provisions in nearly every jurisdiction that has tried to impose them. T
he asymmetry is telling. Google’s Android has always permitted sideloading and a degree of payment flexibility that Apple’s iOS does not, so the regulator’s proposals land harder on Apple, whose business model leans more heavily on the closed loop the CMA is trying to prise open.
The action sits inside a designation the CMA handed both companies earlier this year under the UK’s new digital markets regime, which lets the regulator impose conduct requirements on firms with strategic market status rather than litigating each abuse after the fact.
It is a more European posture than Britain has traditionally taken, and it runs in parallel with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which already forced Apple to allow rival app stores on iPhones across the bloc.
Developers have learned to read these victories carefully. When the Netherlands ordered Apple to allow alternative payments for dating apps, the company responded with a fee structure that left the economics barely changed, which is why the CMA’s insistence that any steering fee sit below current commissions reads less like boilerplate than like a lesson learned.
The EU went further still, charging Apple with breaking antitrust law over precisely these anti-steering rules.
The CMA’s proposals are now open for consultation, and the platforms will have their say before anything is finalised. What is already clear is the direction. Regulators in London, Brussels, Tokyo, and Seoul are converging on the same conclusion about the same toll booth, and the question is no longer whether developers can point users to a cheaper door, but how much the platforms will be allowed to charge for the privilege of opening it.
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