On June 18, 2026, Apple began letting Brazilian developers distribute iOS apps through rival marketplaces and route payments outside its system, cutting its headline commission to as low as 10 percent — and 5 percent for apps distributed entirely outside the App Store. The change flows from a cease-and-desist agreement Apple signed with Brazil's competition regulator, CADE, on December 23, 2025, closing a probe that began with a 2022 complaint from e-commerce group Mercado Livre. It is the broadest concession Apple has made anywhere outside the European Union's Digital Markets Act.
That makes this a fitting moment to revisit the regulator that got there first — and got far less. The Netherlands' Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) was the first competition agency in the world to force Apple to open its payment rails, ordering in 2021 that dating-app developers be allowed to use alternative payment systems. Apple fought it for years. On June 16, 2025, the Rotterdam District Court largely upheld the ACM and confirmed that Apple had forfeited the full €50 million in penalty payments — €5 million per week — it incurred for non-compliance. A landmark, yes. But four and a half years on, the Dutch remedy still applies to one app category.
The steelman for the Dutch approach
The ACM deserves credit, and its critics should concede the hard part. In 2021 no regulator had established that a dominant platform's payment-tie and anti-steering rules could be an abuse of dominance under competition law at all. The ACM built that precedent from scratch, narrowly, in a single well-documented market where Apple's conduct was easiest to prove. Picking dating apps was not timidity; it was litigation strategy. A narrow case is a winnable case, and the Rotterdam court's confirmation — that Apple's mandatory in-app payments, anti-steering rules, and 30 percent commission (15 percent for smaller developers) were "unreasonable conditions" — now anchors every European argument that follows. Precedent is a public good. The Dutch paid to create it.
The problem is what the precedent bought. Because the order was scoped to dating apps and let Apple choose between offering in-app alternatives or external links rather than both, Apple complied in the most grudging way available: a separate entitlement, scare-screen warnings, and a commission only marginally below 30 percent. Developers outside the dating vertical got nothing. Consumers saw no price drop. The €50 million in penalties was real money but a rounding error against App Store revenue, and it took until mid-2025 for a court to make even that stick. A narrow remedy, exhaustively litigated, produced narrow results.
Why Brazil's structural settlement did more
CADE reached a wider outcome in less time by aiming at the architecture rather than one symptom. Its November 2024 preliminary measure already targeted both pillars of the closed model — distribution and payments — and when Apple appealed, CADE's tribunal upheld the measure in May 2025. Faced with a recommended condemnation in June 2025, Apple asked to negotiate. The resulting agreement, per CADE's own announcement, requires Apple to "allow the opening of alternative app distribution channels" and to let developers "display alternative payment methods and third-party offers side-by-side" with its own. Apple has 105 days to implement and faces fines up to BRL 150 million for non-compliance. The agreement runs three years.
From this publication's vantage — pro-competition, but skeptical of regulation that punishes form over function — the Brazilian model is the more proportionate one, precisely because it is more structural. A negotiated, time-boxed settlement that resets the rules for the entire platform delivers more openness per unit of legal warfare than a category-by-category injunction that invites a decade of compliance theater. It also avoids the EU's opposite failure: the DMA's prescriptive, perpetually-renegotiated interface mandates that have turned Brussels and Cupertino into permanent litigants. Brazil split the difference — broad scope, defined endpoint, ordinary commercial incentives left intact.
The caveats that should temper the enthusiasm
None of this means Apple's openness is genuine yet. The Brazilian terms preserve real friction: third-party payments still sit alongside Apple's own, purchase history and subscription management will not reflect outside transactions, and Apple has said it will not refund them. A 5 percent "Core Technology" charge on downloads through rival stores means "commission-free" is a misnomer. As the EU experience shows, the gap between a remedy on paper and competition in practice is where Apple does its best engineering. The test for CADE is not the signing; it is whether a Brazilian developer can actually launch a rival store and a Brazilian consumer can actually pay less by the end of 2026.
Still, the comparison is instructive for every regulator now weighing how to take on app-store gatekeeping — the UK's CMA under its new digital-markets powers, India's CCI, and others. The Dutch lesson is that being first and being narrow are a costly combination: you create the precedent and absorb the litigation, but your own market sees little change. The Brazilian lesson is that a structural remedy, negotiated rather than imposed and bounded in time, can open more of the platform faster. Proportionate regulation is not the same as timid regulation. Sometimes the proportionate move is the bigger one.