A decade-old grievance, freshly organized
On June 23, 2026, 48 China-based iOS developers published an open letter to the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), asking Beijing's antitrust regulator to investigate and penalize Apple for what they call "unfair and excessively high" App Store commissions (AppleInsider; MacRumors). The developers accuse Apple of abusing its market dominance by blocking third-party app stores and alternative payment systems, and of reneging on an earlier commitment to give Chinese developers rates no worse than Apple offers anywhere else (South China Morning Post).
This is not a new fight. A Beijing law firm raised similar complaints in 2017 over app removals and the flat 30% cut. A 2021 consumer lawsuit reached the Shanghai Intellectual Property Court, which ruled in May 2024 that Apple does hold a dominant position in the market for iOS app-transaction platforms in mainland China — but found no evidence Apple had abused that position, and dismissed the claims (Apple has since asked China's Supreme People's Court to strike the "dominant position" language from that ruling). A separate group of roughly 55 iPhone and iPad users filed another SAMR complaint in October 2025. What's new is the timing: this letter lands three months after Apple cut its standard China commission from 30% to 25%, and its Small Business/Mini Apps Partner rate from 15% to 12%, following what Apple itself describes as discussions with Chinese regulators (Apple Developer News).
Steelmanning the developers' case
The complaint isn't frivolous. Apple already runs a materially different — and cheaper — commission structure in the EU, where the Digital Markets Act forced it to permit alternative marketplaces and web distribution, pushing the effective floor toward roughly 5% for developers who route around the App Store's payment rails. Apple has since extended comparable flexibility to Brazil (10–21% plus a 5% processing fee, with third-party distribution at 5%) under pressure from Brazil's competition authority CADE. The pattern is consistent: Apple relaxes its terms where a regulator or legislature has genuine enforcement teeth, and holds the line everywhere else. China is by a wide margin Apple's largest single national market for App Store commerce — $562 billion in billings and sales in 2025, more than the US's $453 billion, per Apple's own ecosystem report with Analysis Group (Apple Newsroom) — which makes the absence of comparable flexibility there harder for Apple to justify on pure cost-of-service grounds. A court has already found Apple dominant in this exact market. That's a real, evidence-backed grievance, not a manufactured one.
Why an open letter isn't the same as a DMA
The steelman runs out at the remedy. The EU's leverage over Apple didn't come from an antitrust investigation reaching a discretionary finding of "abuse" — it came from the DMA, an ex ante statute that designated Apple a "gatekeeper" and imposed specific, enumerated obligations (permit sideloading, permit alternative payment processors, allow linking out) regardless of whether regulators could prove competitive harm case by case. That structure gives companies predictability: comply with the rule, and the legal exposure ends. China has no equivalent statute for app stores. What it has is the 2008 Anti-Monopoly Law's general prohibition on abuse of dominance, applied through ad hoc SAMR investigations and slow-moving court cases — exactly the framework that took seven years (2017 complaint to 2024 ruling) to produce a finding of dominance without abuse.
Asking SAMR to open an investigation on the strength of a 48-signatory open letter substitutes case-by-case regulatory discretion for the kind of transparent, prospective rulemaking that actually gives developers and Apple a stable target. That's a worse deal for everyone than it looks. An investigation that drags for years, as the 2021 case did, creates exactly the kind of uncertainty that a DMA-style rule is designed to eliminate — and it hands Beijing a lever that can be pulled selectively, against foreign platforms specifically, at moments of broader US-China friction. That risk is not hypothetical: Apple's terms have moved fastest in markets facing statutory deadlines (EU, and now apparently Brazil), and slowest where the only pressure is prosecutorial discretion.
The more proportionate path
Apple's March 2026 rate cut shows regulatory conversation without formal litigation can already move commissions — proof that SAMR doesn't need a drawn-out abuse-of-dominance case to extract concessions. The more proportionate fix is legislative, not prosecutorial: if Beijing believes app-store gatekeeping harms Chinese developers, the durable answer is a narrow, published rule — modeled on the DMA's enumerated obligations rather than an open-ended dominance inquiry — that applies equally and predictably rather than one negotiated app store at a time through investigation threats. Until then, treat this open letter as a bargaining opener that will likely produce another round of unilateral Apple concessions, not as evidence that a formal antitrust finding is imminent or warranted on the record so far.