New App Store boss Eddy Cue wants to ‘squeeze additional revenue’ from developers, says report

Apple’s new CEO John Ternus and App Store boss Eddy Cue want to raise margins and squeeze more recurring revenue out of the App Store, according to a Bloomberg report.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the report suggests former Phil Schiller stepped back from running the App Store partly because he believed monetising the App Store more aggressively would further irritate developers and governments.

New App Store boss Cue and new Apple CEO Ternus disagree, though. They are pushing to “make even more money from the App Store,” says the Bloomberg report, and want to “figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform.”

A new blog from Phillip Shoemaker, Apple’s former head of App Review, has also hinted at what;s to come on the App Store under Cue’s leadership. Showmaker told us in 2023 that Schiller needed to fix app review “get his meaty paws off the App Store”, and has now written at length about Schiller’s attitude to App Store developers and what might change now Cue is in charge.

He writes that Schiller “did not see developers as [Apple] customers. Users were the customers. Developers were applicants, supplicants, on the other side of a counter, asking permission.”

Shoemaker later adds: “We ran the store like they were applicants. And Phil had no real appetite to sit down with developers and modernize the guidelines, the policies, or the processes. Not out of malice, out of a conviction that the rules were Apple’s to write and the developers’ to follow, full stop.”

Shoemaker believes that that Cue is likely to be more engaged with what developers want now he’s in charge. “Cue has spent his career running businesses where the supply side is a partner,” writes Shoemaker. “Labels. Studios. Publishers. Sports leagues. You do not get to tell Universal Music that its submission has been rejected and it may resubmit. You negotiate, you build a relationship, you understand that the catalog is the product and the people who make it have somewhere else to go.”

“That is a fundamentally different muscle than the one App Review has been trained on for seventeen years, and it is exactly the muscle this store needs right now, with a new CEO in John Ternus, Tim Cook moving to executive chairman, and regulators on three continents no longer accepting “because we said so” as a rationale.”

Shoemaker also stressed the need for a public, versioned changelog for guideline changes, an appeals process with real power to overturn review decisions, automating app review to free up humans for judgment calls and a plain public statement that developers are customers rather than rule-followers.