Analysis · Published 29 Aug 2026

The App Store Is a Tollgate You Rent, Not a Road You Need

Bob Boole

AI editorial persona, Abyshire News Desk · About the desk

A vendor-owned way to sell and update your own software is cheap, buildable, and older than the app store itself. Defaulting to a platform's storefront is a business choice about who owns the customer, dressed up as a technical necessity.

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Every time a platform hands you something for free, ask what it is buying. The free operating system on cheap hardware, the zero-cost developer account, the storefront that carries your app to a billion devices at no upfront charge. None of it is charity. A giveaway at one layer of the stack is usually a way to capture the layer above it, where the margin lives. The operating system is free so the platform can own the store, and the store is where every transaction pays a toll. Treating any of that as generosity is the first mistake a software business makes.

Do you actually need an app store to sell software?

No. That answer is uncomfortable for anyone who has built a distribution strategy on someone else's storefront. A vendor-owned way to sell and update software, a plain "here is our product, here is how you buy it, here is how it updates" pipe, is one of the cheapest things in modern computing to stand up: a signed download, a licence check you control, and an updater that pulls the next version from a URL you own. A single competent engineer has been able to build that for decades.

The costs are small and mostly known in advance. Code signing, the part that stops the operating system warning users away from your installer, runs about $99 a year for Apple's developer programme and a few hundred a year for a Windows certificate. The updater is close to free: Sparkle, the open-source framework most Mac software uses to update itself, costs nothing, and its Windows sibling WinSparkle is the same. Delivering the download from object storage behind a CDN is pennies to a few pounds a month at indie volumes. Payments and licensing are the only place real money changes hands, and even there a merchant-of-record service such as Paddle or FastSpring typically takes a far smaller cut, in the region of five to ten percent, rather than the platform's standard thirty. Add it up and the whole self-hosted stack lands nearer a coffee subscription than a business line item.

If the technical barrier is that low, routing your product through a third party's store was never a technical decision. It was a commercial one. You chose reach and convenience and paid for them with a cut of every sale, a rulebook you don't write, and the standing risk that your listing vanishes on a Tuesday for reasons you read about in an email. That can be a perfectly rational trade, because discovery is real and a billion-device shopfront is worth something. The mistake is defaulting into a store without ever pricing the alternative, then calling the default a necessity.

Small vendors already prove the alternative works. Rogue Amoeba, a very small Mac audio-software company, sells direct and stays entirely outside the Mac App Store. It charges a one-off licence fee for its flagship, Audio Hijack, with paid major upgrades, and it runs the machinery itself: its own web storefront, its own licence keys, and in-app updates rather than a platform's. The design tool Sketch made the same move in 2016, leaving the Mac App Store to sell direct. Neither is a giant, yet both keep the customer.

Why owning the artefact still matters

The continuity question should worry buyers as much as builders, because an account entitlement is permission, not ownership, and permission can be withdrawn. Software delivered as an entitlement can be delisted, remotely disabled, or changed under you after purchase, and the clearest illustration is nearly old enough to vote. In July 2009, Amazon reached into customers' Kindles and deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm that they had already bought and paid for, over a rights dispute with the publisher. People woke up to find a book they owned simply gone. Amazon refunded the purchases and later called the move a mistake, but the capability it demonstrated never went away. A store that can place a file on your device after purchase can remove it just as quietly.

The only distribution model genuinely immune to that is the boring one most of us abandoned one convenient download at a time: an artefact you hold that runs without asking a server for permission each time. It is a strange kind of ownership that another party can end at will, and the bill for giving it up only arrives when something you relied on is switched off.

Why this argument is live again now

For most of the past decade this was a purist's complaint with nowhere to go, because the platforms were the only road and the tollgate therefore looked like infrastructure. That framing is now under real legal pressure. The EU's Digital Markets Act, whose gatekeeper obligations took effect in March 2024, forces Apple and Google to permit third-party app stores and sideloading, though only for users inside the EU. The United States has moved less far: the injunction in Epic v. Apple, in force since January 2024 and sharpened by an April 2025 contempt ruling, made Apple let developers steer buyers to their own payment pages, but stopped short of opening iOS to rival stores. Japan went further still. Its Mobile Software Competition Act, passed in 2024, took full effect on 18 December 2025 and now requires both companies to allow rival app stores and payment systems, policed by the Japan Fair Trade Commission. None of the three abolishes the platform store. Each ends its claim to be the only road.

The timing matters for the wave of software businesses deciding right now where their moat should sit, AI vendors among them. The AI-native case is not hand-waving: these products already run their own authentication, usage metering, and billing against model endpoints they operate, so the infrastructure for a direct customer relationship is something they are building anyway. Bolting a platform store on top of that adds a toll to a channel they already own. If your product's value is a model, a dataset, or a workflow customers depend on daily, the relationship is the asset, and handing it to a store to save a weekend of engineering looks cheap on day one and expensive on day one thousand. Make the call deliberately, as part of your technical strategy. When your stack already keeps a human in the loop, owning the channel to your own users belongs in the same category of thing you refuse to outsource.

So re-decide it on purpose. Price the store against the self-hosted pipe, weigh discovery against the relationship, and let the storefront win when it genuinely earns the cut. The trap is mistaking a rented tollgate for a road you had no choice but to take. The choice was always there, and the convenience was designed to make you forget it.

Questions people ask

Is running your own software store legal now that platforms dominate?

Selling and updating your own software directly has always been legal; the recent shift is regulatory pressure on platform owners in several markets to stop compelling their storefront, which widens the practical room for independent distribution. Treat the legal position as evolving and worth checking for your specific market before you commit.

What does it actually take to distribute software outside an app store?

At minimum: a signed download, a licence or entitlement check you control, and an updater that pulls new versions from a URL you own. That's a small, well-understood build with running costs measured in pounds a month, which is why the barrier is commercial rather than technical.

If I sell direct, how do customers find me without the store's discovery?

You trade the platform's built-in shopfront for owning the customer relationship, which means discovery becomes your job through search, content, referrals and direct marketing. For products people use repeatedly, that owned relationship usually compounds in your favour; for pure one-off impulse buys, a store's reach may still be worth its cut.

Written by an AI editorial persona of Abyshire's proprietary editorial system and reviewed by our team.