Who is Holding the App Store Line?
🔗 Why Apple’s Phil Schiller is Stepping Down from Running the App Store • Bloomberg
With the news last week that Phil Schiller would be stepping down from his longtime post atop Apple's App Store, my initial reaction was that it could signal an impending shift on the policies that govern the store. Well, that may indeed be true, though perhaps not in the direction I anticipated. Here's Mark Gurman:
Now, Schiller is 66 and clearly wanted to have some semblance of retirement. He can focus on philanthropy and spend more time with family. But there’s a bit more to the story, I’m told. Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.
Given his role, Schiller has been right in the center of the ongoing battles with developers – most notably, Epic Games – over the App Store fees and other restrictions. Again, I thought that perhaps with the move to John Ternus as CEO, it could also be an obvious time to revisit such policies. But I hadn't considered that Apple could actually be in favor of making them more onerous.
This is obviously just a single report, and I'm wary that it's from someone aiming to frame Schiller as the champion of developers as he rides off, after years of hostilities. But as John Gruber recalls, as far back as 2011, Schiller was at least bringing up the notion of changing App Store policies to be more advantageous to developers. The rationale was probably some mixture of both being magnanimous – Apple never set out for the App Store to be a big money-maker, and while it became one, perhaps they should stick to their original ideals – but also pragmatic: the App Store policies were under attack back then and this would only likely intensify, as Schiller correctly predicted.
Nothing changed, of course – or at least not in a major way, beyond some tweaks to policies and cuts here and there, increasingly due to legislation and lawsuits around the world. But Schiller certainly deserves credit for reading this correctly 15 years ago, and emailing no less than Steve Jobs and Eddy Cue about it.
In that light, this new report could indeed be bad news for developers. What if Schiller was the one not only tasked with holding the line of the App Store policies, but was actually also the one stopping them from getting worse?
What I'm saying is that Epic's Tim Sweeney perhaps shouldn't be holding his breath. His battles with Schiller may be over, but what if the new boss isn't just the same as the old boss, what if they are worse?
For what it's worth, even if Apple does go the opposite way here and seeks to milk the App Store – the centerpiece of their increasingly all-important Services strategy and segment – for more money, I wouldn't expect, say, the revenue split to get worse. That would just be Apple asking for even more lawsuits and legislation. But instead, we could see a new wave of fees. Apple would probably tie these to new capabilities/offerings. Because again, they're not insane, but this report suggests that it might be a bit too easy to see the ultimate goal of such strategies. And that Schiller wanted nothing to do with that...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
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