Stripe Poised To Capture App Store $90B
Stripe vs Apple
Stripe is the clearest immediate winner because this ruling turns App Store billing from a closed tollbooth into another checkout surface that already fits Stripe’s core product. Developers can now send a user from an iOS app to a web checkout, let them pay with cards or Apple Pay, and return them to the app with universal links. That swap cuts the headline payment cost from up to 30% to roughly standard card processing, and it drops new volume onto Stripe’s existing rails without Stripe needing to change the merchant workflow much.
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Stripe has the distribution to capture this faster than smaller payment companies. It processed $1.4T of TPV in 2024, is used by half of the Fortune 100, and already documents a custom iOS digital goods flow built around external checkout pages, Apple Pay, and universal links back into the app.
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The bigger change is not only payments, but stack unbundling. Apple had been bundling billing, fraud, subscriptions, chargebacks, and tax into one in app system. Once developers route payments outside, Stripe often becomes the first replacement layer, then tax, billing, and orchestration vendors like Anrok, Taxwire, Primer, Adyen, PortOne, and Airwallex can attach around it.
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Not every dollar of freed volume moves at once. External checkout adds friction, so the first movers are likely larger apps with enough scale to care about margin, often around $5M to $10M in revenue and above, or apps that already sell across web and mobile. That still leaves Stripe well positioned because those companies usually already run web payments through Stripe or a similar PSP.
From here, the prize is less about one legal win and more about who becomes the default commerce layer outside Apple’s walls. Stripe has the best shot at being that default in the U.S., then pulling more billing, subscription, and merchant software onto the same account. As App Store payments open up, the market should shift from one mandatory bundle to a broader payments stack with Stripe at the center of gravity.