On May 1, 2026, Epic Games opened the Epic Games Store on the iPhone in Japan — the first independent iOS marketplace to go live under the country's new platform-competition regime. It launched almost empty. Fortnite was there; not a single Japanese developer had signed on. The law worked exactly as written and produced a storefront with nothing on the shelves. That gap is the most instructive thing to happen to mobile-platform regulation this year.
A law built to open the gate
Japan's Act on Promotion of Competition for Specified Smartphone Software — Act No. 58 of 2024, widely called the Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA) — is an ex ante competition statute aimed squarely at the mobile duopoly. In March 2025 the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) designated Apple Inc., its local arm iTunes K.K., and Google LLC as regulated "specified software" operators, finding their scale "capable of excluding or controlling the business activities of other business operators." The core obligations took full effect on December 18, 2025, requiring Apple to permit third-party app marketplaces, alternative in-app payment processing, and out-of-app links to external offers.
Structurally this mirrors the EU's Digital Markets Act, but the design is more surgical. CSIS characterises Japan's model as "a middle path" that "balanced broad ex-post regulation with targeted ex-ante enforcement to prevent harmful conduct before it occurs." For a publication that favours proportionate, evidence-based rules over sprawling mandates, this is close to the right instinct: identify the chokepoint — control over app distribution — and pry it open, rather than micromanage the whole platform.
The fee math that worries Epic
Apple complied on schedule. With the iOS 26.2 release on December 17, 2025, it introduced alternative marketplaces alongside a revised fee menu: a 5 percent Core Technology Commission on the sale of digital goods and services for apps distributed outside the App Store, plus a further 5 percent if a developer still uses Apple's in-app purchase, and a 15 percent store-services commission on linked-out web transactions. The headline number is real, and it is low by Apple's own standards — well below the 15–30 percent it has historically charged, and structurally gentler than the per-install Core Technology Fee it deployed in the EU.
Here is the strongest case for Apple. iOS is a platform that costs billions to build and secure; the APIs, developer tools, and integrity systems that make an app like Fortnite run do not become free the moment the binary is delivered through someone else's store. A modest ongoing commission for continued access to that platform is a defensible way to recoup that investment, and billing-data reporting has legitimate uses in fraud detection and tax compliance. A 5 percent fee is not, on its face, confiscatory.
Tim Sweeney's arithmetic tells a different story. Epic caps its own processing fee at 12 percent. Stack Apple's 5 percent Core Technology Commission on top, add the operational cost of Apple's mandatory billing-data reporting, and Sweeney puts the effective burden for a developer using Epic's store at as high as ~17 percent — erasing most of the savings that were supposed to make the alternative worth the switch. Sweeney also argues that the deeper deterrent is not arithmetic but fear: "game companies are afraid of retaliation from Apple," he said, worried about unfavourable treatment on the App Store that still hosts the overwhelming majority of their users. He has said Epic "will file a complaint with the Fair Trade Commission."
Circumvention, or compliance?
This is now a live legal question, not a rhetorical one. The MSCA does not merely command Apple to permit rival stores; it is meant to make those stores viable. If residual fees and conditions are calibrated so that no rational developer would ever leave, the opening is formal rather than real — and an anti-circumvention reading of the Act would treat that as a violation of its purpose.
The regulator's case deserves a fair hearing. Apple retains genuine market power over a captive installed base, and a fee tuned precisely to neutralise the economics of every alternative would hollow out the statute while nominally obeying it. Policing that outcome is exactly what an ex ante regime is for.
But the proportionate response is to scrutinise conduct, not to set Apple's prices. The two grievances most likely to defeat the law are behavioural: the threat of retaliation against developers who diversify, and a reporting regime broad enough to function as a compliance tax. Both are addressable through the MSCA's existing prohibitions on disadvantaging developers and on access conditions that exceed what is necessary. A 5 percent commission, by contrast, is a number on which reasonable people disagree — and turning the JFTC into a price-setter for platform IP would be a cure worse than the disease, chilling the very investment that makes iOS worth distributing on.
Opening the gate is not the same as filling the room
The empty Japanese storefront also points past Apple entirely. As CSIS warns, regulation that "penalises incumbents without empowering emergent challengers" will not produce competition on its own; that depends on venture capital, exit pathways, and a developer culture willing to take the risk. Japan got the legal architecture right — a targeted, ex-ante opening rather than a blunderbuss. The next test is whether the JFTC enforces the anti-circumvention provisions against conduct, resists the temptation to regulate price, and recognises that a law can succeed at opening a door and still fail if no one is willing to walk through it.