What the CMA is proposing
On 30 June 2026 the UK Competition and Markets Authority opened a consultation on a steering conduct requirement for Apple's mobile platform — a rule that would force Apple to let app developers tell UK users, inside their own apps, about cheaper ways to pay outside the App Store, and link them straight there (CMA consultation, gov.uk). Apple currently bans this outright. The CMA's own framing is that developers should be able to "communicat[e] and transact… while increasing competition in app distribution" (CMA Citizen Space consultation). Crucially, the proposal doesn't set a fee — it proposes that whatever Apple charges for steering must be lower than current App Store commissions, justified by an evidence-based cost-and-value framework, with savings either passed to consumers or reinvested in developer innovation (CMA news announcement, gov.uk). The consultation closed 28 July 2026; a final decision is expected later this year, under powers the CMA gained when it designated Apple as having Strategic Market Status over its mobile OS, native app distribution and browser engine on 22 October 2025 (CMA case page, gov.uk).
Apple's objection
Apple filed its formal response on 29–30 July 2026, calling the proposal "highly intrusive" and arguing it amounts to price regulation of a private platform rather than a competition remedy. The company's core claim: "there is no evidence that allowing developers to direct users to purchase options outside the App Store would result in savings for customers" — and the fee-fairness test the CMA wants to apply would hand a regulator ongoing authority to set Apple's commercial terms. Apple backed the argument with scale: the App Store generated more than £46.5 billion in UK billings and sales in 2025, with commission taking under 3.5% of that total (MacRumors). The CMA has rejected the characterization, saying it is proposing "principles to ensure that the fees Apple and Google charge for steering are fair and reasonable, not to directly set prices" — a distinction that will matter enormously if this ends up before the Competition Appeal Tribunal.
The steelman for the CMA
The CMA's position deserves a fair hearing before dismissing it. A pure ban on steering is not a garden-variety pricing choice — it's a restriction on information flow that prevents a functioning market from forming at all. If Apple can charge whatever commission it likes on in-app purchases and forbid developers from even mentioning that a cheaper option exists elsewhere, competition on price becomes structurally impossible, not just difficult. That is a materially different problem from ordinary platform fee-setting, and it is precisely the harm European regulators found when the European Commission fined Apple €500 million in April 2025 for breaching the EU Digital Markets Act's anti-steering obligation, ruling that Apple must let developers "inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside the App Store, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases" (European Commission). Seen against that backdrop, the CMA isn't inventing a novel intervention — it's importing a remedy a major regulator has already tested and enforced.
Where the CMA's approach overreaches
But there is a real difference between requiring Apple to permit steering — which is a straightforward access remedy — and requiring the CMA to bless the specific fee Apple charges for it, using a bespoke "cost and value" framework administered case by case. The former restores a missing market; the latter substitutes a regulator's judgment for one. Commentary on the CMA's broader mobile-ecosystem package has already flagged that even where it goes furthest, it tends to intervene at the platform's edges — permitting steering, mandating interoperability commitments — while leaving Apple's underlying architectural control largely intact (Tech Policy Press). That's arguably the right level of ambition for a young regime still finding its feet under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act — but a fee-fairness test that requires Apple to justify commercial terms to a regulator on an ongoing basis is a bigger step than "allow developers to link out," and it's the step Apple is right to contest most vigorously.
What should happen next
Apple's £46.5 billion/3.5% framing is a rhetorical flourish, not a rebuttal — the relevant question isn't what share of total billings commissions represent, but whether developers can currently compete on price at all, and today they cannot. The CMA should hold firm on requiring Apple to permit steering outright. But it should resist the temptation to turn "fair and reasonable" into a standing licence to regulate Apple's commercial terms indefinitely. A narrower rule — steering permitted, a modest and time-limited fee cap rather than an open-ended cost-justification regime — would deliver the competitive correction without inviting the years of tribunal litigation that a vaguer "fairness" standard all but guarantees.