Apple Faces U.S. Bill Requiring Third-Party App Stores and Alternative Payments
What You Need to Know
- AICOA targets platforms with $175 billion annual revenue reaching 34% of U.S. households; Apple qualifies.
- Bill prohibits favoring own products, blocking data portability, conditioning access on unrelated purchases, locking defaults, retaliating against legal challengers.
- AICOA would require Apple to allow third-party app marketplaces and alternative payment methods on App Store.
- Apple claims compliance obligations slow product rollouts; regulators reject privacy concerns as justification for restrictions.
Senate Democrats and Republicans rarely agree on tech policy, but AICOA has attracted both, and Apple is treating that bipartisan momentum as the more immediate threat than anything Brussels has thrown at it lately.
The bill, reintroduced by Senators Chuck Grassley and Amy Klobuchar after stalling without a floor vote in 2022, targets platforms with at least $175 billion in annual gross revenue that reach 34 percent of U.S. subscriber households or monthly active users. Apple clears both bars. The prohibited conduct list covers:
- Favoring a platform’s own products over competitors
- Blocking business users from porting their own data
- Conditioning platform access on purchasing unrelated services
- Locking users into default settings
- Retaliating against companies that raise legal concerns
Apple’s statement leans hard on the DMA comparison, calling AICOA an import of “Europe’s failed policies.” That framing is deliberate. The company recently announced it cannot bring its Siri AI features to EU users at iOS 27 launch because negotiations over DMA interoperability rules broke down, giving Apple a fresh, concrete example to point to when arguing that compliance obligations slow product rollouts rather than open markets.
What the bill actually changes
The practical stakes for the App Store are real. AICOA would require Apple to allow third-party app marketplaces and alternative payment methods, the same structural changes Apple has resisted in Europe and in U.S. courts. Apple’s counter-argument, that open platform access hands sensitive user data to any company requesting it, is the same privacy shield it deployed against the DMA, and regulators on both continents have largely rejected that framing.
The bill’s sponsors included language explicitly preserving safety, privacy, and national security carve-outs, which undercuts Apple’s loudest objection without fully resolving it. Endorsers include Mozilla, Proton, DuckDuckGo, and Y Combinator, companies that compete with or depend on Apple’s platform and have obvious reasons to want the rules changed. Whether AICOA gets further than it did in 2022 depends on whether that coalition can hold attention longer than the last attempt.
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