Whether Apple and Google take a share of your revenue is not decided by the size of your business, your category, or your negotiating skill. It is decided by one question: is the thing you are selling consumed inside the app, or out in the world.
Get that question right and the rest of this topic becomes manageable. Get it wrong and you either hand fifteen to thirty per cent to a store that was never entitled to it, or you build a payment flow that gets your app rejected. This article sets out where the line falls, what the commission actually is on both stores, and the UAE VAT rule that most local app owners have backwards.
Everything below was checked in August 2026 against Apple's and Google's own published documents and the Federal Tax Authority's own guidance. This area moves faster than almost anything else in app development, so treat every percentage here as a pointer to a live page rather than a fact with a long shelf life.
Do I have to use the store's billing?
Only for what is consumed inside the app. Apple's rule requires in-app purchase to unlock features or functionality, naming subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, and unlocking a full version, and rules out your own mechanisms such as licence keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, and cryptocurrency [1]. Google's payments policy requires Play Billing for charging for app downloads and for payment for access to in-app features or services, including app functionality, digital content or goods, giving virtual currencies, subscriptions, ad-free versions, and cloud software services as examples [4].
The other side of the line is just as explicit. Apple states that if your app enables people to purchase physical goods or services consumed outside of the app, you must use purchase methods other than in-app purchase, naming Apple Pay or traditional card entry [1]. Google's policy lists physical goods such as groceries, clothing, housewares and electronics, and real-world services such as transportation, cleaning, airfare, gym memberships and food delivery, as outside its billing requirement [4].
Notice that both are obligations, not options. A delivery app is not permitted to route meal payments through in-app purchase, and a content subscription is not permitted to route around it.
Where the line falls for real UAE businesses
Most local apps sit clearly on one side, and the ones that straddle it usually do so at a single feature. A restaurant delivery app, a ride-hailing app, a salon booking app taking payment for an appointment, and a retailer selling physical stock all sit outside store billing entirely and charge through a normal UAE payment gateway. A content subscription, a premium tier, a credit pack, and a feature unlock all sit inside it.
Apple publishes a set of exceptions worth knowing before you assume your case is obvious [1]:
- Reader apps give access to previously purchased content, and Apple names the categories exactly: magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video. They may offer free-tier account creation and account management for existing customers.
- Multiplatform services may let users access content, subscriptions or features acquired elsewhere including on the web, provided equivalent items are also available as in-app purchases within the app.
- Enterprise services sold directly by the developer to organisations for their employees or students may let those users access content purchased outside in-app purchase. Consumer, single-user and family sales must still use in-app purchase.
- Person-to-person services in real time between two individuals, with tutoring, medical consultations, real estate tours and fitness training given as examples, may use other payment methods. One-to-few and one-to-many real-time services must use in-app purchase.
- Free stand-alone apps that accompany a paid web-based tool such as calling, cloud storage, email or web hosting are outside the rule, provided there is no purchasing and no call to action to purchase inside the app.
That person-to-person boundary catches people out. A one-to-one online consultation may be charged your way. The same practitioner streaming a class to fifty people may not.
What Apple charges
Apple's standard commission is thirty per cent, stated in its own Paid Applications Agreement as a commission equal to thirty per cent of all prices payable by each end user [2]. Two routes reduce it to fifteen.
The App Store Small Business Program applies fifteen per cent to developers who earned no more than one million US dollars in total proceeds, meaning sales net of Apple's commission and certain taxes and adjustments, during the twelve fiscal months in the prior calendar year, counted across associated developer accounts [2][3]. Most UAE SMEs are comfortably inside that. Enrolled developers get the reduced rate at every billing cycle.
Separately, auto-renewing subscriptions drop to fifteen per cent once a customer has accrued more than one year of paid service within the same subscription group [2]. Apple's agreement is specific about what does not reset that clock: free trials, retention grace periods of up to sixty days between a lapsed and a resumed subscription in the same group, renewal extension periods, and upgrades, downgrades or crossgrades within the same group [2]. If you are designing tiers, that last item is worth knowing, because moving a customer between plans need not cost you the lower rate.
What Google charges
For markets outside the US, EEA and UK, Google's structure is fifteen per cent on the first million US dollars of annual revenue and thirty per cent above it, with auto-renewing subscriptions at a flat fifteen per cent regardless of tier [5]. A UAE developer selling mainly to UAE and Gulf customers is most likely operating under that structure.
Google restructured its fees for the US, EEA and UK with effect from 30 June 2026, separating a service fee from a billing fee. Using Google Play's own billing carries a five per cent billing fee, and the service fee starts at ten per cent on the first million US dollars of annual earnings, applying also to auto-renewing subscriptions [6]. Rates then differ according to whether a transaction comes from an install made before or after that date, and further reduced tiers arrive later in 2026 [6].
We are deliberately not printing the full new table here. It changed weeks before this article was written, parts of it were still phasing in, and a figure quoted secondhand is exactly what you should not build a revenue model on. If you have meaningful US or European revenue, read Google's current service fees page before you forecast anything.
Can I send customers to my own checkout?
Not from the UAE storefront on Apple, as far as we could establish. Apple's guidelines state that entitlements to link out for digital purchases are not required in United States storefront apps, and that in all other storefronts, apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action directing customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase [1]. Apple has issued a separate entitlement for European Union storefronts under regulatory pressure [8].
We found no evidence of a UAE-specific entitlement on either store, and no UAE-specific alternative billing programme on Google Play, which does operate reduced-fee alternative billing in India, South Korea, the European Economic Area and the United States [7]. The working position for a UAE app is therefore that standard rules and standard commission apply.
There is a commission figure widely quoted for purchases attributed to United States external purchase links. We could not confirm it on a live Apple page, so we are not printing it. If that route is relevant to you, read the entitlement agreement and the current commission table inside App Store Connect rather than any article.
This is the most volatile section in the whole topic. The rules here have been rewritten repeatedly by litigation and regulation since 2021, and regional carve-outs have appeared elsewhere with limited notice. Check the live pages.
The mechanics that take the time
Configuring products is console work. Everything that makes them trustworthy is backend work, and that is where the schedule goes.
Server-side validation is the piece teams underestimate. Both stores provide server interfaces for confirming and tracking transactions, and Google offers real-time developer notifications so your backend learns about renewals, cancellations and refunds as they happen rather than the next time the app opens [12][13]. Deciding entitlements on the device alone is neither secure nor sufficient, because your own revenue reporting and your access control both need a source of truth that is not the phone in someone's hand.
Refunds are handled by the store rather than by you on standard billing, which is a genuine operational shift from a normal gateway. Someone can be refunded through a channel you do not control, so your system has to withdraw access when the notification arrives. Otherwise you carry on serving a customer who has already had their money back.
Trials and introductory offers are configured store-side, which is quietly one of the better things about this model. Changing an offer does not require an app release or a review cycle, so pricing experiments are far cheaper here than in most software. Per-territory pricing is likewise built in, and using it well matters in this region, where a price sensible in Dubai is not sensible in Cairo.
A pattern we see. A UAE business builds the paywall screen first, because it is the visible part, and discovers in the final fortnight that nothing behind it exists: no entitlement model that survives a user changing phone, no handling for a refund arriving three weeks later, no reconciliation between store reports and their own numbers. The paywall is the least important thing on the list and it is almost always built first.
The UAE VAT rule most owners have backwards
On Google Play, being a UAE-based developer means more VAT work, not less. Google's own Play Console help states that if you are located in the United Arab Emirates, you are responsible for determining, charging, and remitting VAT for all Google Play paid app and in-app purchases by customers in the United Arab Emirates [9]. For developers located outside the UAE, Google states that it determines, charges and remits the five per cent VAT for UAE customers instead, and that those developers do not need to calculate and send VAT separately [9].
That is the opposite of the assumption most businesses arrive with. The store does not automatically handle your VAT because it is a store. On Google Play it handles it precisely when you are not local, and steps back when you are.
Apple's position we could not establish, and we are not going to guess at a tax obligation. Apple's Paid Applications Agreement states that responsibility for collecting and remitting tax on sales to end users is determined by an exhibit to that agreement, updated from time to time through App Store Connect [2]. That exhibit is not published publicly and sits behind a developer login, so we could not read it. Check your own Agreements, Tax, and Banking section in App Store Connect, and confirm the outcome with a UAE tax adviser before you rely on it.
The underlying framework is worth understanding either way. The Federal Tax Authority's e-commerce VAT guide defines an electronic marketplace as a distribution service operated by electronic means including a website, internet portal, gateway, store, or distribution platform, allowing suppliers to make supplies of electronic services to recipients by electronic means [10]. An app store fits that definition. Which party then accounts for the VAT turns on whether the marketplace acts as a disclosed agent, in which case the supply is treated as made directly by the supplier to the recipient, or an undisclosed agent acting in its own name, in which case there are two supplies, supplier to intermediary and intermediary to recipient [10].
On the commission itself, Google states that for a UAE-based developer local VAT does not apply to the service fee payable to Google, but that you may need to self-assess VAT [9], which points at the reverse charge mechanism for services bought from a non-resident supplier. Apple's general guidance says commissions and fees do not include taxes and that applicable taxes may be added to your invoice [11].
None of this changes your registration position. Registration remains mandatory once taxable supplies and imports exceed AED 375,000 over the previous twelve months or are expected to within thirty days, with voluntary registration from AED 187,500, as covered in our guide to VAT-compliant e-commerce in the UAE. Selling through a store changes who accounts for VAT on a transaction, not the threshold that applies to your business.
Store commission against a payment gateway
Store commission runs fifteen to thirty per cent while a UAE payment gateway runs around two and a half to two point nine per cent, a gap large enough to change what you build. UAE gateway rates in our own payment gateway comparison sit around two and a half to two point nine per cent plus a small per-transaction fee. Store commission is fifteen to thirty per cent.
That is a five to ten-fold difference, and it is tempting to read it as an optimisation problem. It is not. On physical goods and real-world services you are required to use your own gateway, and on digital goods consumed in the app you are required not to. The comparison is useful for understanding your margin and for deciding whether a digital product belongs in the app at all, not for finding a route around the rules.
Where it genuinely informs a decision is at the edges. If your product could reasonably be delivered as a real-world service or as in-app digital content, the commercial consequence of that design choice is significant and worth deciding deliberately rather than by accident.
What it costs to build
Adding store billing to an existing app starts from around AED 4,000 with us. That reflects a two-platform integration with server-side validation rather than a single connection, which is how it should be priced. A simple one-off purchase without renewal logic sits lower, and a full subscription system with tiers, trials, per-territory pricing and reconciliation sits above it.
These are our own figures rather than a market survey, since no official body publishes rates for this work. Final pricing depends on scope, and mostly on whether your backend already has a user and entitlement model to attach to. For context, a standard connection between two systems starts from around AED 1,500 in our system and API integration guide.
Before you build, settle these
- Is what you sell consumed inside the app or in the real world? Everything else follows from this
- If it is inside the app, are you a one-off purchase, a consumable, or a subscription?
- Which commission tier applies to you today, read from the store's live page rather than an article
- Who accounts for UAE VAT on your sales, confirmed with an adviser and with your own console settings
- Does your backend have somewhere to record an entitlement that survives a user changing device?
- What happens in your system when a refund notification arrives three weeks after the sale?
The first question is worth more than the other five combined, and it costs nothing to answer. If you are scoping an app and want that settled before anyone writes code, contact us.
References
[1] Apple, App Store Review Guidelines. developer.apple.com
[2] Apple, Apple Developer Program License Agreement, Schedule 2 and 3 (Paid Applications). developer.apple.com
[3] Apple, App Store Small Business Program. developer.apple.com
[4] Google Play, Payments policy. support.google.com
[5] Google Play, Service fees. support.google.com
[6] Android Developers Blog, Play expanded billing and fee structure, 24 June 2026. android-developers.googleblog.com
[7] Google Play, Alternative billing. support.google.com
[8] Apple, Developer news: External Purchase Link Entitlement for EU storefronts. developer.apple.com
[9] Google Play Console Help, Tax rates and value-added tax (VAT). support.google.com
[10] UAE Federal Tax Authority, VAT Guide: Electronic Commerce (VATGEC1). tax.gov.ae
[11] Apple, Understanding taxes, App Store Connect Help. developer.apple.com
[12] Apple, App Store Server API. developer.apple.com
[13] Google, Real-time developer notifications, Android Developers. developer.android.com
