Phil Schiller, the Apple executive who for more than a decade has been the public face of the App Store, is stepping back from running it — and a new report says his wariness about where new CEO John Ternus wants to take the business played a central role.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Schiller's decision was partly personal: he wants more time with his family and for philanthropy. But there was another factor. Ternus, who officially took over as CEO from Tim Cook on September 1, and services chief Eddy Cue want to improve the App Store's margins and bring in more recurring revenue. Schiller, Gurman reports, believed that squeezing more profit out of the business would only increase conflict with governments and developers.
Crucially, Gurman's account does not describe a dramatic falling-out. There was no big fight over strategy. Instead, Schiller concluded he did not want to be involved in carrying out the plan — so he decided to step down from the App Store role while remaining at Apple as an Apple Fellow working on unspecified projects.
If accurate, the episode is a striking signal of the post-Cook era taking shape. Schiller was the executive who defended the App Store's commission structure in the witness box during the Epic Games antitrust trial, and he has been the most recognizable defender of Apple's developer policies for years. His exit from the role means the architects of the next phase — Ternus and Cue — will pursue a more aggressive monetization strategy without his counterweight.
The backdrop is heavy with regulatory and legal pressure. In July, the EU's top court upheld Apple's designation as a 'gatekeeper' under the Digital Markets Act, keeping the App Store under Europe's interoperability and anti-steering obligations. Apple's appeal to the US Supreme Court in its long-running Epic Games case is pending. Developer complaints over commissions and payment rules have been a constant for years, and the report frames Schiller's concern as exactly that: more margin, more scrutiny.
Ternus's direction will soon be visible to everyone. Apple holds its first major product event under the new CEO on September 9, where a foldable iPhone and the iPhone 18 generation are expected — the commercial stage on which the new App Store economics will have to prove themselves. (Reuters' own coverage of the same story adds no independent confirmation of the reported motives, which remain Bloomberg-sourced.)
