Google Cut App Store Fees. Not for South Africa Yet.

Google announced it is cutting its Play Store commission from 30 percent to 20 percent, and subscription fees from 15 percent to 10 percent, following its settlement with Epic Games. The reduced rate started rolling out this week in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, with Australia, Japan and Korea following later in 2026, and no confirmed date for South Africa or the rest of Africa. If your app takes in-app payments here, you are still on the old rate, and you might be for a while yet.

Here is the part worth saying plainly: app store commissions were never a fixed law of nature. They are a default, and defaults get renegotiated by whoever has enough leverage to force the issue, in this case Epic Games after years of litigation. South African founders do not have that leverage, and cannot assume the same discount lands here on the same timeline, or at all. Waiting for Apple or Google to hand back margin is not a strategy. It is hope with a roadmap attached to someone else's business.

We ran into this directly on a Flutter app we built for a non-profit client with a paid membership tier. The organisation could not afford to lose 15 to 30 percent of member contributions to standard in-app purchase commissions, so we did not use them. We built the payment flow through an external webview using SumUp instead, a pattern Apple explicitly permits under its guideline for reader and community apps, and handled it through our Flutter mobile app development work. The harder problem was keeping the app and the payment provider in sync: when a member completes a donation in the webview, the app has no native way of knowing the payment succeeded. We solved it with a webhook listener in the Strapi backend. The checkout URL carries the member's ID as hidden metadata, SumUp fires a webhook back to Strapi the moment the payment clears, and Strapi upgrades that member's status the instant they return to the app. The organisation keeps essentially all of every contribution, minus a 1.7 percent card processing fee, regardless of what Apple or Google charge that month.

This is not a fringe workaround. Apple's own reporting shows its App Store ecosystem facilitated more than $1.4 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2025, and that developers paid no commission at all on over 90 percent of that volume, according to Apple's June 2026 App Store ecosystem report. Most of the volume moving through Apple's own platform already sits outside the commission it is famous for charging. External payment flows are a normal, sanctioned path, not a grey area for developers willing to build them properly.

If you are planning an app with subscriptions, donations or any recurring payment, ask your developer two questions before a line of code is written: can this run through an external, compliant payment flow instead of the native purchase API, and how will the app know the moment that payment has actually cleared. The second question is the one most quotes miss, because it is backend engineering, not screen design, and it is where the real work sits. It is also worth reading up on what a custom app actually costs to build in South Africa before you assume a commission-free flow is the expensive option, because in our experience it rarely is once you compare it against a year of lost margin. Get this into the brief early, the same way we cover it in what to ask before you hire a mobile app developer.

Google's cut is real, and worth watching if you operate in the US, UK or EU. It changes nothing for a South African business shipping an app this quarter. Build the payment architecture that protects your margin regardless of what Cupertino or Mountain View decide to do next, because that decision was never in your control, and it still is not.