Longtime Apple executive Phil Schiller reportedly stepped away from running the App Store partly because he wanted no involvement with a push by the tech giant’s new leadership to squeeze more money from the lucrative platform.
Schiller, 66, a veteran of both the Steve Jobs and Tim Cook eras, remained in charge of the App Store and Apple’s splashy product-launch events after stepping down as the company’s marketing chief and becoming an Apple Fellow in 2020.
But new Apple CEO John Ternus and services boss Eddy Cue are looking for ways to wring greater profits and more repeat revenue from the App Store, Bloomberg reported over the weekend.
Schiller, by contrast, believed that pushing the App Store harder for profits would only inflame tensions with developers and governments, according to Bloomberg.
The disagreement never erupted into an internal clash, but Schiller reportedly shunned the strategy.
The Bloomberg report sheds new light on Schiller’s decision to relinquish oversight of the App Store, a business estimated to generate more than $30 billion a year that has faced mounting pressure from regulators and developers.
Schiller’s latest concerns echoed objections he privately raised over Apple’s efforts to collect commissions on outside purchases during its long-running legal battle with “Fortnite” maker Epic Games.
In 2023, he opposed Apple’s plan to slap a 27% commission on purchases made on developers’ websites after users followed links from their apps, according to court records.
Schiller said internally that he had “many issues with the commission concept” and made clear he was “not on team commission/fee,” according to the records.
Apple’s chief financial officer, Luca Maestri, and other finance executives favored charging the commission, while Schiller opposed it and later testified that collecting fees from developers could damage Apple’s relationship with them.
CEO Tim Cook ultimately sided with Maestri’s camp. The decision later came back to haunt Apple.
US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled in April of last year that Apple had willfully violated an earlier injunction stemming from the Epic case. In her blistering order, the judge singled out Schiller as having pushed Apple to comply with the injunction.
“Cook chose poorly,” Rogers wrote of the CEO’s decision to side with the finance team over Schiller.
Rogers held Apple in civil contempt, ordered it to stop collecting commissions on purchases made through external links and required the tech giant to cover Epic’s legal fees stemming from the contempt fight.
A federal appeals court upheld the contempt finding in December 2025 but narrowed Rogers’ punishment, ruling that Apple could potentially charge developers a fee tied to legitimate costs and intellectual property used in facilitating outside purchases.
The episode marked a striking shift for an executive who had spent years publicly defending Apple’s tight control over the App Store.
Schiller publicly argued in 2020 that the marketplace was designed around “one set of rules for everybody,” and defended Apple’s commissions by pointing to the company’s investments in app distribution, developer tools, security, privacy and payments.
But he had questioned the size of Apple’s cut as far back as 2011.
In an internal email disclosed in the Epic litigation, Schiller floated whether Apple should “ratchet down from 70/30 to 75/25 or even 80/20,” in terms of the split of profits between developers and Apple, if the App Store surpassed $1 billion in annual profit and could maintain that level.
After Schiller formally took charge of the App Store in 2015, Apple began introducing lower commission rates for some developers.
In 2016, the company cut its take on subscription revenue from 30% to 15% after customers remained subscribed for more than a year. Apple later introduced a program charging qualifying small developers a 15% commission.
Schiller nevertheless remained a tough enforcer of the App Store’s rules. The Post has sought comment from Apple.
