App Store Economy Hits $1.4 Trillion, 90% Commission-Free

Apple’s annual App Store economy report puts developer billings and sales at $1.4 trillion for 2025, but the number Apple is quietly most proud of is buried in the footnotes: more than 90 percent of those transactions generated zero commission for Apple.

That figure reframes the headline. Apple has spent years defending its 15 to 30 percent commission structure against regulators in the EU, the US, and South Korea. Emphasizing how little it actually collects from most transactions is a legal and political argument dressed as a press release.

The AI data is the one genuinely new signal here. Consumer-facing AI apps grew at four times the rate of other categories in 2025, which is a sharper gap than most analysts were expecting this early in the AI app cycle. That kind of growth rate, sustained across a full year, suggests the monetization problem that plagued early AI apps is starting to resolve.

How Apple Counts to $1.4 Trillion

The methodology matters more than the number. Apple’s calculation includes purchases made inside apps, physical goods and services ordered through apps, and a slice of activity from alternative marketplaces now operating in the EU. Those alternative stores still run on Apple’s infrastructure, so Apple counts them. Critics of the App Store’s market power have noted this framing before: Apple defines the ecosystem broadly when reporting scale and narrowly when calculating its own obligations.

The report lands about three weeks before WWDC 2026, which is not accidental timing. Regulatory scrutiny of Apple’s app distribution practices is still active in multiple jurisdictions, and a $1.4 trillion ecosystem number, paired with a 90-percent-no-commission claim, gives Apple’s policy teams something to cite in hearings. The underlying growth is real. The presentation of it is doing considerable work.