Free answer · verified July 2026
What do app stores actually take in 2026?
Less than the 30% everyone still quotes, if you're small. Apple takes 30% standard, but 15% under the Small Business Program for developers earning under $1M a year. Google Play moved to roughly 15% effective from June 30, 2026 (a 10% service fee plus a 5% fee when you use Play Billing), with higher tiers above $1M following the Epic settlement. So for most new consumer apps the realistic store rate is about 15% on both platforms.
The numbers, dated
Apple: 30% standard; 15% under the Small Business Program for developers with under $1M in annual proceeds, re-qualified yearly (developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program). Google Play:roughly 15% effective from June 30, 2026, structured as a 10% service fee plus a 5% billing-service fee when you use Play Billing, replacing the old 30% (play.google additional-service-fee tier terms). Tiers of 20%/10% apply above $1M in annual earnings, part of the settlement fallout from the Epic litigation. Some commentary cites a 26% user-choice-billing rate; that figure is not consistently confirmed, so treat the ~15% blended rate as the canonical planning number.
Why the sticker comparison misleads
“Stripe is 3%, Apple is 30%” compares a payment fee against a distribution fee. Direct billing’s true cost includes the subscription state machine, dunning, global tax remittance, PCI scope, and chargeback liability you now own. Merchant-of-record services price that bundle around 5% all-in. Once the small-developer store rate is ~15% rather than 30%, the gap is real but half the size the headlines suggest, which is why store billing plus an entitlement layer is a defensible default for a new mobile app.
Watch the moving parts
Two areas are genuinely unsettled: US external purchase links (Apple currently takes 0% there post-Epic, but litigation continues, so model the worst case) and the EU fee stack, where credible sources reach opposite conclusions. Fee facts like these rot monthly; every figure above carries a capture date in the reference and gets re-checked on cadence.
Where this comes from
These figures are from the payments and billing-economics topics of The App Masterclass, verified against the primary store documents on the dates shown. The orientation chapter is free in full, no signup, and the verification method ispublic here.