Apple’s New CEO Wants More App Store Cash. Schiller Didn’t Want That Fight

Looks like Phil Schiller is not just easing into a quieter Apple Fellow schedule. Mark Gurman says he also wanted out of the next fight over App Store money.

In Sunday’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg, Gurman reports that Schiller is 66 and clearly wanted something closer to retirement, with more time for family and philanthropy. There is more to it, he says. New CEO John Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store, raising margins and squeezing extra recurring revenue from a platform already estimated at more than $30 billion a year. Schiller, who handed off the store and Apple’s product events around August 31, reportedly figured that kind of squeeze would only further irk developers and governments, so he wanted no part of it. Gurman says there was no internal blowup, just a preference to step back rather than run another round of fee warfare.

The App Store is moving back into Cue’s services group, which ran it until 2015, with Carson Oliver on day-to-day work reporting to Cue. Schiller keeps the Fellow title and “unspecified” projects, though people inside Apple told Bloomberg it looks like a real step toward retirement. Events oversight passes to deputy Nola Weinstein.

That timing matters while fee pressure keeps piling up, right as Ternus heads into Apple’s September 9 event and our what to expect watch list for Canadians. Schiller spent years on Epic litigation, EU DMA fights, and policy rewrites, and Canadian developers are already in the mix through a CIPPIC leave application at the Competition Tribunal on exclusive distribution, in-app payments, and anti-steering. The same Power On week also had Cook’s chairman pay package underlining how much of the old guard is still nearby.

Apple has not detailed any new fee plan publicly, so treat the margin talk as rumour with a serious source behind it. After the hardware rush, keep an eye on Cue’s side of the house, and whether talk like iPhone Handoff sticks around.