Malaysia is the latest Asian jurisdiction to be drawn into the global reckoning over mobile app store economics. According to reporting on the Malaysia Competition Commission's (MyCC) ongoing market work, the regulator has been examining Apple's App Store and Google Play practices through late 2025 and into 2026, with consumer groups pressing for sideloading rights and alternative payment systems for local developers facing the long-standing 30% platform commission.
The pressure is not happening in a vacuum. The European Commission's Digital Markets Act (DMA) is now well into its enforcement phase, with Apple and Google designated as gatekeepers and ordered to permit alternative app distribution and payments in the EU. In India, the Competition Commission (CCI) has been pursuing its own App Store probe — though as MediaNama reported on 16 May 2026, the Delhi High Court has just asked the CCI not to pass final orders while Apple's constitutional challenge to penalty provisions based on global turnover remains pending. The litigation in Delhi is a useful reminder for Putrajaya: ambitious competition remedies imported wholesale can stall on the rocks of due process and proportionality.
What MyCC is actually looking at
The substantive concerns are familiar. Both stores charge up to 30% on in-app purchases, restrict developers from steering users to cheaper web checkouts, and — on iOS in particular — prohibit installing apps from outside the official store. For Malaysian developers, the commission is paid in US dollars on revenue earned in ringgit, which compounds the squeeze. Consumer advocacy submissions, per reporting on the MyCC's outreach, have echoed the asks now familiar from Brussels and Seoul: permit third-party payment processors, allow steering to external offers, and create a pathway for sideloading.
None of this is fanciful. The case that the duopoly's terms warrant scrutiny under Malaysia's Competition Act 2010 — which prohibits abuse of dominance under Section 10 — is reasonable on its face. App distribution on smartphones is a textbook two-sided market with high switching costs, and the commission structure has been essentially frozen for over a decade despite radical changes in payments infrastructure.
The pro-innovation case for intervention — and its limits
From a pro-innovation perspective, there is a real argument for opening the payments layer. A 30% take on digital goods is not a market-clearing price; it is a rent extracted from a position of structural control. Letting Malaysian developers — particularly the SME game studios and creator-economy startups that have grown out of the Cyberjaya ecosystem — use Stripe, Razer Merchant Services, or local FPX rails would directly lower their cost of doing business and improve consumer choice.
South Korea showed in 2021, with its amendment to the Telecommunications Business Act, that a narrowly tailored requirement to allow alternative in-app payment systems can be implemented without dismantling platform security. Japan's Mobile Software Competition Act, enacted in 2024, took a similar payments-first approach. These are the templates MyCC should study most closely.
The harder question is sideloading. The EU's DMA mandate forcing iOS to permit alternative app marketplaces is, even by its supporters' admission, a live experiment. Apple's compliance architecture — Core Technology Fee, notarisation requirements, scare-screens — has been criticised as malicious compliance, but the underlying security tension is genuine. iOS's curated distribution model is one of the reasons malware rates on the platform are a fraction of Android's, and Malaysian consumers — particularly older users targeted by the wave of e-wallet phishing scams Bank Negara has been warning about — benefit from that.
A proportionate Malaysian intervention would therefore likely look more like Seoul's than Brussels'. Mandate the unbundling of payments. Prohibit anti-steering. Require parity in API access for competing services. But preserve the gatekeepers' ability to run security review and to charge a reasonable, transparent fee for distribution itself — disentangled from payment processing.
What MyCC should avoid
Three things would turn a useful intervention into a counterproductive one. First, copy-pasting DMA-style designations and fines calibrated to global turnover. As the Delhi High Court's intervention this month underscores, that approach invites years of constitutional litigation and creates regulatory exposure wildly disproportionate to Malaysia's market size. Second, mandating sideloading without a serious threat assessment of how it interacts with Malaysia's existing scam economy — there is no point opening a distribution channel that becomes a malware highway six months later. Third, treating commission rates as a price control problem. The right remedy is competition in payment processing, not a regulator-set commission ceiling.
It is also worth noting what the courts, not just regulators, can do. The U.S. Epic v. Apple litigation has already forced Apple to permit external payment links in the U.S. App Store, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation continues to push, including in an April 2026 Ninth Circuit amicus brief, against expansive theories of app-store liability. Competition pressure is being applied from multiple directions; MyCC does not need to be maximalist to be effective.
The bottom line
Malaysia has an opportunity to set a template for ASEAN: a narrow, evidence-based intervention that gives developers genuine payment choice and ends anti-steering, while resisting the temptation to import every contested element of the European playbook. Done right, it would lower costs for Malaysian creators, improve consumer welfare, and avoid the legal quagmire CCI is now navigating. Done badly, it would simply reproduce the worst of Brussels' enforcement theatre in a market a hundredth its size.