Apple's New EU Purchase Rule Splits Into Two Paths

Most studios read "Apple loosened its EU purchase rules" as one decision: link out or don't. It isn't one decision. As of August 2026, Apple split it into two separate entitlements, and only one of them triggers the fee stack everyone's been budgeting around.

The two entitlements, plainly

The first is what Apple calls the Alternative Terms Addendum. It lets an app tell an EU player about a purchase option outside the App Store — a lower price on your website, a deal on an alternative marketplace, a subscription available through another app. The player reads it. Nothing is tappable. There's no button that takes them anywhere.

The second is the StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement. This is the one that puts an actual clickable link in the app, sending the player straight to an external checkout page. Same underlying idea — pointing a player at a cheaper option — but a genuinely different mechanism.

That distinction matters because Apple charges for them differently. Mentioning a price costs you nothing extra. Letting a player tap through to buy it does.

Where the fee stack actually attaches

The External Purchase Link Entitlement is what pulls in Apple's layered EU fee structure: an Initial Acquisition Fee (a percentage on purchases from users who installed your app in the last six months, waived for existing users and for Small Business Program members on the App Store side), a Store Services Fee, and, for apps enrolled in it, the Core Technology Commission.

None of that fires on the Alternative Terms Addendum path. You can tell a player "this is $2 cheaper on our website" and that sentence alone doesn't trigger anything beyond your normal App Store terms. The fee stack is tied specifically to the clickable link, not to communicating a price.

This is easy to miss if you've been reading EU purchase-link coverage as a single story. It reads that way in most of it — "Apple must allow external links now" — because the clickable-link path is the interesting one to write about. But if your studio's actual goal is reducing App Store take rate on a specific SKU, the mention-only path is worth checking first, because it's the one that doesn't cost you anything to use. We've covered the broader app-to-web decision and what the EU's DMA changed for iOS distribution separately — this is the narrower fee mechanics underneath both of those.

Why you'd still pick the clickable path

The mention-only path has an obvious cost of its own: friction. A player who reads "cheaper on our website" has to remember that, leave the app on their own, find your site, and complete a purchase there with no direct handoff. Most players won't do that. Every extra manual step between "I want this" and "I bought it" loses conversions, and losing that many conversions can easily cost more than the fee you were trying to avoid.

The clickable link removes that friction — one tap, into a checkout flow you control. That's worth the fee stack for a purchase where the dollar amount is large enough that the fee difference is meaningful in absolute terms: a season pass, a big currency bundle, anything where losing 30% of the drop-off crowd is a smaller loss than paying the platform's standard cut on the whole transaction.

For a small, impulse-priced item, the math usually runs the other way. The friction of leaving the app costs you proportionally more of your conversion than the fee saves, and the mention-only path isn't worth the trouble either — you're better off just selling it through the App Store's normal flow and not touching either entitlement.

A framework, not a rule

Treat this as a decision you make per purchase type, not once for the whole store:

Small, frequent, impulse-priced items stay in the normal in-app purchase flow. Neither entitlement is worth the added complexity for a $1 pack.

Mid-value items where you want to nudge price-sensitive players toward a cheaper option, without engineering a full external checkout reconciliation flow, are a reasonable fit for the mention-only Addendum. You get to say the price is lower elsewhere; you don't take on a new fee structure or a new purchase-verification pipeline to do it.

High-value, low-frequency purchases — season passes, large currency bundles — are the strongest candidates for the clickable External Purchase Link. The fee stack is real, but it's spread over a bigger transaction, and the conversion recovery from removing the extra manual step is usually worth it at that price point.

Whichever path you pick, remember it only applies within the EU, and only to players purchasing through an EU storefront. It doesn't change anything about your US, UK, or rest-of-world App Store economics, and Apple has revised these terms more than once already since the underlying rulings landed — treat the choice as something to re-check periodically, not something you set once and forget.

Building for either path

If you go with the clickable link, your backend needs to reconcile a purchase that didn't arrive through Apple's own purchase-verification callback — a different receipt shape, a different refund path, a different fraud signal set. That's real engineering work regardless of which fee structure you're trying to avoid, and it's worth scoping before you commit to the clickable path on a SKU, not after.

If you go mention-only, the engineering lift is close to zero — it's a copy change and a link to your own site, no new reconciliation pipeline required. That's part of why it's worth checking first: it's the cheaper option in both fee terms and build time, even if it converts worse.

Pick the highest-value SKU in your catalog, decide which entitlement fits it, and measure the actual conversion and net revenue against your current in-app baseline before rolling the decision out further. See how gamemantra measures a pricing-path change against a real holdout group rather than assuming the fee savings survive contact with real player behavior.