A landmark U.S. federal ruling has effectively opened a new revenue lane for developers: they can now guide users to pay for digital goods and subscriptions outside Apple’s iOS App Store, a change allowing developers choosing to process payments off-platform to recoup the 27% “link out commission” that Apple levied when a purchase starts inside an app.
For subscription and digital goods businesses, that reclaimed revenue can fund product expansion, marketing firepower, or boost their bottom line. For every $10 million now processed off-platform, developers can add anywhere from $2.7 million straight to the P&L.
Until now, Apple has largely absorbed the burden of fraud — protecting transactions with a mix of biometric checks and device-level tokenization and a billion-device risk graph that filtered out fraud and abuse. Although friendly fraud disputes and item-not-received (INR) claims processed through Apple Pay still fall to developers, their fraud controls prevented many attacks from ever reaching checkout.
Now, with the potential to move payments outside those rails and recover that revenue, the responsibility, compliance, and liability lie squarely with the developer. The reward is real, but so is the risk.
The Fraud Risks When You Own Checkout
Handling payments yourself via a processor means instant fulfillment and opportunity for bad actors. Digital goods are downloadable, transferable, and rarely recoverable, making them a prime target.
Most processor-bundled fraud filters were never designed for the speed and abuse patterns of digital content. Their risk engines lean on limited, transaction-level data, leaving merchants blind to cross-merchant attack patterns and identity-level signals.
When you combine instant fulfillment with that limited view, fraudsters see a soft target — and revenue gains can quickly erode through:
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- Card-Not-Present Fraud: Instant delivery means fraudsters can monetize stolen cards in seconds
- Friendly Fraud & Chargebacks: Subscription disputes spike when customers forget, regret, or deny legitimate purchases
- Account Takeover (ATO): Bot-driven credential stuffing drains stored payment methods and loyalty credits
- Digital Asset Resellers: Fraudsters harvest rare skins or NFTs from compromised accounts and flip them for profit, eroding user trust
- Promo, Trial & Refund Abuse: Fraud rings farm free trials or exploit flexible refund policies to resell digital goods
- Synthetic Identity Attacks: Fraudsters blend real and fake data to create “clean” payment profiles that slip past basic checks
As risk increases, you may start to see a lower authorization rate from your issuers. While issuers trust Apple to process payments, if you begin to see a rise in fraud, they may classify you as high-risk. This perception increases the likelihood of declined transactions and will negatively impact your conversion. For merchants operating in the EU, the impact on conversion may be compounded by lower PSD2 exemption rates, resulting in greater authentication friction and higher abandonment rates.
Ignoring these threats isn’t an option — the 30% you’ve reclaimed will vanish if attacks slip through and your bank authorization rate drops. Yet many businesses respond by simply switching on the basic fraud filters bundled with their payment processor, assuming “good enough” protection. But that convenience comes at a cost.
Why Payment Processor Fraud Filters Fall Short
Most processor-bundled tools were built for broad retail, not the split-second economics of digital content. And when businesses choose to take this route of convenience, the gaps start to show up fast:
Siloed Data
Processors only see the traffic flowing through their pipes, missing cross-merchant patterns that reveal a card-testing spree hopping from a gaming app to a streaming service in minutes.
Static Rules & Velocity Checks
Fraud tactics evolve daily; hard-coded thresholds either miss emerging attacks or reject good customers, forcing expensive manual reviews.
Transaction-Only Focus
Payment risk is half the battle. Policy abuse, subscription cycling, and promo farming erode lifetime value every bit as much as chargebacks — yet sit outside most gateway rule sets.
The net effect is an expensive balancing act: higher fraud losses on one side and conversion-killing false declines and manual review overhead on the other.
Identity Intelligence: The Modern Playbook
Replacing Apple’s safety net doesn’t require building your own from scratch, and it’s not about simply introducing more rules. Modern fraud strategy starts by seeing the identity behind every transaction, not just the card data:
- Forter’s Identity Graph of over 1.8 billion identities weaves together devices, emails, payment tokens, and behavior, instantly recognizing trusted customers — or repeat offenders — no matter how often credentials change
- Real-time decisions in <400ms keep checkout frictionless, preserving the near-instant experience users associate with in-app purchases
- Network Effects share early attack patterns across over 200,000 of the world’s leading brands, turning an attempted hit on a gaming platform into a blocked charge on a streaming service minutes later
Forter’s Trust Platform harnesses this Identity Intelligence to help merchants capture the full 30% margin uplift and cut chargebacks by as much as 70% — without turning checkout into a fortress of friction.
Owning the Upside Without the Downside
Moving payments outside the App Store is more than a technical change; it’s a strategic re-architecture of revenue ownership. Done right, you are:
- Safeguarding revenue from card-not-present attacks, ATO, and policy abuse
- Preserving customer experience with sub-second, invisible fraud screening
- Controlling costs by slashing manual reviews and dispute fees
When Identity Intelligence stands in for Apple’s built-in defenses, the 30% you save stays saved — fueling growth rather than covering fraud. That’s how digital-first brands turn a legal ruling into a durable competitive edge: more margin, tighter security, and customer trust that scales right alongside revenue.
