Phil Schiller left the App Store over Apple's margin push
Apple's new leadership wants more money out of the App Store, and the man who ran it for a decade reportedly walked away rather than fight that fight. It matters more than a routine exec shuffle: the store is where the agentic-coding boom has to land.
Phil Schiller stepped down as head of the App Store reportedly because he wanted no part of a plan to squeeze more margin out of it. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that new CEO John Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to improve App Store margins and pull in more recurring revenue. By Gurman's account there was no blowup — Schiller is said to have concluded that chasing more profit from the business would only deepen Apple's conflict with regulators and developers, so he left instead. Schiller handed over the App Store and Apple events on August 31, staying on as an Apple Fellow; day-to-day the store now runs under Carson Oliver, reporting to Cue, who oversaw it before Schiller took it in 2015.
The levers Apple is reportedly weighing are all friction with developers. The obvious ones: raise the $99-a-year developer membership, charge the largest developers a traffic-based subscription to offset infrastructure costs, and automate more of human app review. Review is expensive and, in an era when a single developer with a coding agent can ship a dozen apps a month, increasingly outmatched — but automating it is exactly the kind of move that draws both developer fury and regulatory attention. Apple has not commented on any of this, and none of the changes are confirmed.
The AI angle is the part worth watching. Apple is reportedly looking for margin at the exact moment the cost of building software has collapsed. If agentic tooling floods the App Store with submissions, the review chokepoint gets both more valuable and more brittle — and a company that raises developer fees while automating the human check on quality is picking a fight with the one constituency it needs for its on-device AI story: the people who build apps for it. Schiller's exit reads less like a retirement than a warning about which way the new regime is leaning.
What to watch: whether any of these changes surface at Apple's September 9 event, or whether the company lets the trial balloon drift.
If Apple raises developer fees while automating app review, does that push you toward shipping elsewhere? Tell us in the comments.
