Apple did not open up the iPhone in Brazil out of goodwill. A regulator forced it to, ending a fight that started in 2022, and the company has spent the months since designing terms that give developers almost no reason to take the exit it was ordered to build.
The changes went live June 18 for anyone on iOS 26.5 or newer. Developers in Brazil can now sell through marketplaces other than the App Store and process payments without Apple’s billing.
The case behind this began when MercadoLibre, Latin America’s largest e-commerce company, brought a complaint about Apple’s App Store rules to the competition watchdog CADE four years ago. CADE found a problem. Apple settled late last year, and the concession it made is genuine.
What it did next undercuts that concession.
The pricing is where you see it. A developer who stays in the App Store but uses a third-party payment processor still owes Apple a 21% commission. Route users to a website to pay, and Apple takes 15% of whatever they spend within seven days of the tap.
A US Court already found this to be illegal. Pull the app out and ship it through a rival store and Apple still collects 5% on sales through what it calls the Core Technology Commission. A reduced 10% tier covers small developers and year-old subscriptions, lowering the bill without loosening the grip.
Tallied up, leaving the App Store costs about what staying costs, so staying becomes the obvious choice. Apple set the prices to land exactly there.
The reporting rule drops the pretense. Apple makes developers track and report all transactions made through an outside link or a rival store, even the ones a customer abandons before paying, and hand those records to the very company they routed around.
Epic Games, years into its own war with the App Store, named the play. “Intentionally designed to thwart competition,” it wrote, describing terms built to “undermine alternative stores and payments in Brazil.” The same setup is already running in Japan, where Apple rolled out near-identical rules in December, so Brazil reads less as a one-off than as a template Apple plans to reuse wherever a regulator pries it open.
Apple’s reply is the one it reaches for every time, which is safety. It says Brazil’s rules protect children and privacy more tightly than Europe’s Digital Markets Act, that age ratings follow apps out of the store, and that buying outside its system means losing refunds, subscription management, and Apple support.
Some of that holds. It also happens to be the argument of the party collecting rent on the wall, which is reason enough to weigh the claim against who profits from it.
What genuinely opened is narrow. On iOS 26.5, Brazilians can set a rival marketplace as their default in Settings, and notarized apps can reach a phone without passing Apple’s full review. That helps, up to a point. With the fees tuned to keep the App Store the cheapest path, a default you pay extra to choose is a default in name only.
Epic, for its part, is not retreating. “We’ll keep working with policymakers in Brazil to open up the mobile app ecosystem,” it said, and added that it is “full speed ahead to bring the Epic Games Store to iPhones in the next few months.”
So Apple lost the case and held onto the leverage. It now sets the price of the exit it was forced to open, and logs who walks through it. That is the kind of loss a company writes for itself.
