Apple to soon earn a billion US dollars thanks to AI in the App Store
Apple Intelligence is considered a flop, yet Apple is still making cash with the hype around Artificial Intelligence. The reason: The App Store's fee model.
AI usage on a smartphone.
(Image: Lalaka / Shutterstock.com)
Apple really has little to counter the major AI corporations like OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), or Google (Germini): Apple Intelligence is considered technically inferior as long as there is no cloud support from the competition and the improved voice assistant Siri is still taking its time. Nevertheless, Apple is said to have earned almost a billion US dollars from Artificial Intelligence in 2025 alone. The solution to the puzzle: The App Store and its commission model, through which Apple collects between 15 and 30 percent if users use its billing system, which many do for convenience.
Large packages for 200 Euros per month
As the Wall Street Journal reports, citing figures from market researcher AppMagic, nearly 900 million dollars were collected in 2025. This is said to be the sum that apps from the generative AI sector have paid to Apple.
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The value is likely to increase further in 2026 – AppMagic estimates that the billion mark will be broken. This is not only due to the ongoing hype surrounding such apps, which include classic chatbots, video and image generators, and increasingly also Vibe coding programs. But also because AI companies regularly increase prices and customers are willing to pay up to 200 Euros or more per month for usage without (major) limits.
Apple offers the toll road to the user
The fact that Apple charges only 15 percent instead of 30 percent per user for subscriptions from the second year onwards is also said not to diminish the profits, according to AppMagic. However, the distribution is not very healthy: Currently, three-quarters of AI commission revenue in the App Store is said to come from OpenAI. Grok by xAI follows in second place. According to AppMagic, up to 100 million dollars are collected in one month. However, the business is partly volatile. For example, download numbers for the official ChatGPT app have decreased.
Charles Rinehart, investment chief at asset management firm Johnson, which holds shares in Apple, told the Wall Street Journal that the iPhone group can act as a kind of toll road for AI providers. However, at the same time, it has to spend less on capital costs. The latter have become gigantic in building AI infrastructure, i.e., for chips or data centers. The big exception here is Apple; direct investments have hardly increased in recent years. AI providers could also decide to handle subscriptions only via their own websites, and Apple's regulation forces lower tariffs. However, the former is more inconvenient for users, and the latter takes a long time.
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