Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., center, arrives at U.S. district court in Oakland, California, on Friday, May 21, 2021.
Nina Riggio | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In the past few weeks, Apple has madeseveralchanges to its App Store rules, allowing a larger number of companies to access a lower commission rate or evade Apple’s mandatory 15% to 30% cut entirely.
But while the concessions can seem like a shift in Apple’s approach to App store policy, when examined in the history of the App Store, they are a clear continuation of strategy going back to 2008.
Apple has historically made small changes to its “guidelines,” a 13,000-word document that says what iPhone apps can and can’t do, while defending its core interests that Apple has the right to determine which software can operate on iPhones, and set its own financial terms for those developers.
Apple has also not yet changed its policy of taking 30% of in-app gaming purchases, which comprise the largest category of App Store revenue. Apple’s App Store grossed $64 billion or more in total sales in 2020, according to analysis based on Apple disclosures.
JPMorgan analyst Samik Chatterjee said in a recent note that he believed the financial impact on the company on one emailing change would be “modest” and other tweaks reducing Apple’s cut for some apps to 15% would be “minimal.”
The regulators and developers who criticize Apple’s App Store have a variety of complaints in the past decade: Its 30% cut is too high, its manual App Review process is arbitrary and powerful, the App Store depresses prices for software and teaches consumers that updates are free.
So Apple has carved out categorical exceptions to the 30% fee, allowed software makers the ability to appeal or challenge its rules, and changed single rules in response to lawsuits or media attention.
Events in the coming months may force Apple to tweak its policies again. A decision in a trial with Epic Games is expected in the coming weeks. The European Union is examining penalties and remedies after finding Apple violated antitrust laws after a Spotify complaint. South Korea recently passed a law that could force it to allow customers to use alternative billing systems.
But looking at App Store history, it’s likely that Apple will continue to push in private negotiations and public lobbying for smaller, non-structural changes to the App Store that address some complaints but does not change its control over iPhone software.
Controversial from the beginning
Apple’s App Store has faced controversy since its launch in 2008. A year after that, the FCC probed the company over its refusal to approve the Google Voice app.
Now there is more regulatory pressure from countries and developers around the world, and it is leading to more rule changes. Apple made some of the recent concessions because of settlements in a developer class action lawsuit in the United States and an agreement with Japan’s Fair Trade Commission, although Apple is applying the changes around the world.
Those tweaks essentially allow companies like Spotify and Tinder’s parent company Match Group to bypass Apple’s sometimes 30% cut of gross sales, addressing a standing complaint that dates back at least five years. Apple also reduced its take to 15% for news apps that participate in Apple News, its own news app.
Apple officials say they are meaningful changes that address key concerns from software makers.
Some of Apple’s opponents, even those that have petitioned for those changes, say that they don’t go far enough, and are part of a pattern of dividing its critics by placating some of them with one-off rule changes.
“Our goal is to restore competition once and for all, not one arbitrary, self-serving step at a time,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek tweeted this week in response to Apple’s in-app linking rule change.
“Apple’s strategy is Divide and Conquer: carve off special deals for different developer segments,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said last month in a statement to CNBC in response to Apple’s news app concession.
Epic Games is suing Apple seeking to be able to install its own app store on iPhones — which is the big change that Apple wants to fight off.
A history of Apple changing App Store rules
2009: Apple does not approve Google Voice, FCC investigates. A year after the App Store went live, the FCC started probing it over its refusal to approve the Google Voice app, which acted as a second phone number.
Apple responded to the FCC, providing many details about its app review process for the first time, and arguing that it had the right to reject entire categories of apps.
In its letter, Apple also detailed for the first time its Executive Review Board, a body headed by Apple executive Phil Schiller, which makes final decisions on “new and complex issues.”
2011: Apple requires in-app payments for digital goods, creates the “reader rule.” In-app purchases with a 30% fee were introduced in early 2009. But in February 2011, Apple significantly tightened its control over the App Store by announcing it planned to force companies to use Apple’s in-app purchase system if they offered digital subscriptions.
At first, Apple offered exceptions for products like Kindle or the New York Times, where users may have purchased e-books or digital subscriptions off-app. But companies still needed to implement in-app purchases with Apple’s cut, at the same price as their off-app subscriptions.
This didn’t work for many publishers, who wanted to retain their direct relationship with customers. By June, Apple had backtracked on some of its more draconian guidelines, allowing companies to pass on the 30% fee to customers or to, if they chose, not offer an Apple in-app purchase at all.
Shortly afterwards, Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller started to question Apple’s 30% fee, and suggested lower revenue sharing levels, such as 20%, according to an email released as part of the Epic Games trial.
This is when Apple started to put its first restrictions on redirecting users in-app to the publisher’s website, which were reversed in recent weeks.
2016: Apple reduces cut for 2nd year of subscriptions to 15%. By 2015, Spotify had publicly challenged tested Apple’s restrictions on subscriptions, first by emailing customers to tell them it’s less expensive to subscribe directly, instead of through the App Store. This was against Apple’s guidelines, and its one of the rules that was officially clarified as part of Apple’s concessions last month.
Shortly afterwards, Spotify removed Apple in-app purchases entirely and started a process of challenging Apple’s rules with government regulators.
In 2016, Apple announced that it would alter its revenue sharing agreement, specifically for subscription apps. Apple still charged 30% for the first year of a subscription, but subscribers who lasted more than 12 months would cost the app a lower, 15% rate of gross sales. Apple also opened subscription billing to all App Store apps and introduced search ads, which let developers pay for better placement on an App Store search page.
Although Schiller is no longer a senior vice president at Apple, he remains an Apple employee with the title “fellow,” and continues to lead App Store policy.
2019: Apple backtracks on parental control apps, introduces appeals process. By the time Apple’s annual developer conference kicked off in 2020, the App Store had received considerable antitrust attention, specifically to its ability to reject apps, especially apps that competed with Apple features, such as parental control apps which gave users the ability to set screen time limits for kids.
Apple reversed some of its policies about parental control apps in 2019 after negative media attention, allowing some of them onto the store, and creating software tools that they could use to build their apps.
But the skirmish highlighted that Apple’s App Review process was arbitrary, and sometimes held up app updates over minor details or, worse, because the app didn’t comply with in-app purchase rules.
Developer protests over App Review continued to grow through 2020, and at Apple’s annual developer’s conference, Apple said that it would implement an appeals system for developers to challenge Apple’s rules, although many app makers say it hasn’t solved their complaints with the approval process.
2020: Apple reduces cut to 15% for small companies. Last November, Apple introduced the Small Business Program, a high-profile olive branch to lawmakers and app developers.
It reduced the take from 30% to 15% for any company making less than $1 million per year through the App Store. But because apps are a winner-take-most business, it didn’t hurt Apple’s finances too badly — one estimate at the time suggested the top 1% of app publishers generate 93% of App Store revenue. But it did cut the fees for the majority of individual app developers.
Documents from a settlement in 2021 said that the creation of the Small Business Program was because of a class-action lawsuit.
2021: Apple reduces cut to 15% for news apps that participate in Apple News, allows developers to direct users to alternative payment systems. Antitrust attention on the App Store heated up in 2021. Earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook testified at a trial over App Store practices against Epic Games. Multiple states and the U.S. Congress saw bills introduced which could force Apple to allow alternative app stores.
In August, Apple reduced its subscription cut for any publisher from 30% to 15%, addressing a segment of developers who had fought off App Store changes back in 2011. There was a catch though — those news apps had to participate in Apple’s news aggregator.( News apps are not the main moneymaker on the App Store.)
Apple also settled a class-action lawsuit with smaller U.S. developers, paying $100 million and clarifying guidelines about apps emailing their own customers.
In September, Apple settled with the Japanese FTC and said that “reader” apps could link out to sign up customers for subscriptions on their own websites. All three of these changes addressed concerns that first popped up in 2011 when Apple created the reader rule.
Bitcoin fell on Monday as volatility in the price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency continues following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump to create a strategic bitcoin reserve for the United States.
Bitcoin was trading at $81,712, down over 5% but off earlier lows, at 9:42 a.m. Singapore time, according to Coin Metrics.
The reserve will be funded by coins that have been seized in criminal and civil forfeiture cases and there are no plans for the U.S. government to buy more bitcoin. After the strategic reserve announcement last Thursday, crypto prices declined as investors were disappointed it wasn’t a more aggressive program.
Other cryptocurrency prices also dropped on Monday. Both ether and XRP were down about 7.5% at around 9:43 a.m. Singapore time.
Some investors, however, said the move to establish a reserve was bullish in the long-term.
“I absolutely think the market has this wrong,” Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday. “The market is short-term disappointed” that the government didn’t say it was immediately going to start acquiring 100,000 or 200,000 bitcoin, he added.
Hougan pointed towards comments on X from White House Crypto and AI Czar David Sacks, who said the U.S. would look for “budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies have no incremental costs on American taxpayers.”
“I think the right question to ask is: did this executive order make it more likely that in the future, bitcoin will be a geopolitically important currency or asset? Will other governments look to follow the U.S.’s lead and build their own strategic reserve? And to me, the answer to that is emphatically yes,” Hougan said.
“The reason that questions matters is that’s the question that determines if bitcoin is $80,000 a coin or $1 million a coin.”
Hougan called the decline in crypto prices a “short-term setback.”
“I think the market will soon find its footing and realize that actually this is incredibly bullish long term for this asset and for crypto as a whole,” he said.
A person walks past the entrance to a Google building in Dublin, Feb. 15, 2023.
Artur Widak | Anadolu | Getty Images
After landing internship offers from Amazon, Meta and TikTok, computer science student Chungin “Roy” Lee has decided to move to San Francisco.
But he won’t be joining any of those companies.
Instead, Lee will be building his own startup that offers a peculiar service: helping software engineers use artificial intelligence to cheat in their technical job interviews.
“Everyone programs nowadays with the help of AI,” said Lee, a 21-year-old student at Columbia University, which has opened disciplinary proceedings against him, according to documents viewed by CNBC. A Columbia spokesperson said the university doesn’t comment on individual students.
“It doesn’t make sense to have an interview format that assumes you don’t have the use of AI,” Lee said.
Lee is at the forefront of a movement among professional coders who are exploiting the limitations of remote job interviews, popularized during the Covid pandemic, by using AI tools off camera to ensure they give hiring managers the best possible answers.
The hiring process that took hold in the work-from-home era involved candidates interviewing from behind a Zoom screen rather than traveling, sometimes across the country, for on-location interviews, where they could show their coding skills on dry-erase boards.
In late 2022 came the boom in generative AI, with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Since then, tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of programmers while touting the use of AI to write code. At Google, for example, more than 25% of new code is written by AI, CEO Sundar Pichai told investors in October.
The combination of rapid advancements in AI, mass layoffs of software developers, and a continuing world of remote and hybrid work has created a novel conundrum for recruiters.
The problem has become so prevalent that Pichai suggested during a Google town hall in February that his hiring managers consider returning to in-person job interviews.
Google isn’t the only tech company weighing that idea.
But engineers aren’t slowing down.
Lee has turned his cheating into a business. His company, Interview Coder, markets itself as a service that helps software developers cheat during job interviews. The internship offers that he landed are the proof he uses to show that his technology works.
AI assistants for virtual interviews can provide written code, make code improvements, and generate detailed explanations of results that candidates can read. The AI tools all work quickly, which is helpful for timed interviews.
Hiring managers are venting their frustrations on social media over the rise of AI cheaters, saying that those who get caught are eliminated from contention. Interviewers say they’re exhausted from having to discern whether candidates are using their own skills or relying on AI.
‘Invisible’ help
The cheating tools rely on generative AI models to provide software engineers with real-time answers to coding problems as they’re presented during interviews. The AI analyzes both written and oral questions and instantaneously generates code. The widgets can also provide the cheaters with explanations for the solutions that they can use in the interview.
The tools’ most valuable feature, however, might be their secrecy. Interview Coder is invisible to the interviewer.
While candidates are using technology to cheat, employers are observing their behavior during interviews to try to catch them. Interviewers have learned to look for eyes wandering to the side, the reflection of other apps visible on candidates’ glasses, and answers that sound rehearsed or don’t match questions, among other clues.
Perhaps the biggest tell is a simple “Hmm.”
Hiring managers said they’ve noticed that many candidates use the ubiquitous sound to buy themselves time while waiting for their AI tools to finish their work.
“I’ll hear a pause, then ‘Hmm,’ and all of a sudden, it’s the perfect answer,” said Anna Spearman, founder of Techie Staffing, an agency that helps companies fill technical roles. “There have also been instances where the code looked OK, but they couldn’t describe how they came to the conclusion.”
Henry Kirk, a software developer and co-founder of Studio.init in New York, said this type of cheating used to be easy to catch.
“But now it’s harder to detect,” said Kirk. He said the technology has gotten smart enough to present the answers in a place that doesn’t require users to move their eyes.
“The eye movement used to be the biggest giveaway,” Kirk said.
Interview Coder’s website says its virtual interview tool is immune to screen detection features that are available to companies on services such as Zoom and Google Meet. Lee markets his product as being webcam-proof.
When Kirk hosted a virtual coding challenge for an engineering job he was looking to fill in June, 700 people applied, he said. Kirk recorded the process of the first interview round. He was looking to see if any candidates were cheating in ways that included using results from large language models.
“More than 50% of them cheated,” he said.
AI cheating tools have improved so much over the last year that they’ve become nearly undetectable, experts said. Other than Lee’s Interview Coder, software engineers can also use programs such as Leetcode Wizard or ChatGPT.
Kirk said his startup is considering moving to in-person interviews, though he knows that potentially limits the talent pool.
“The problem is now I don’t trust the results as much,” Kirk said. “I don’t know what else to do other than on-site.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai during an event at the Google for Startups Campus in Warsaw, Poland, Feb. 13, 2025.
Omar Marques | Anadolu | Getty Images
Back to the Googleplex
It’s become a big topic at Google, and one Pichai addressed in February at an internal town hall meeting, where executives read questions and comments that were submitted by employees and summarized by AI, according to an audio recording that was reviewed by CNBC.
One question asked of management was, “Can we get onsite job interviews back?”
“There are many email threads about this topic,” the question said. “If budget is constraint, can we get the candidates to an office or environment we can control?”
Pichai turned to Brian Ong, Google’s vice president of recruiting, who was joining through a virtual livestream.
“Brian, do we do hybrid?” Pichai asked.
Ong said candidates and Google employees have said they prefer virtual job interviews because scheduling a video call is easier than finding a time to meet in available conference rooms. The virtual interview process is about two weeks faster, he added.
He said interviewers are instructed to probe candidates on their answers as a way to decipher whether they actually know what they’re talking about.
“We definitely have more work to do to integrate how AI is now more prevalent in the interview process,” said Ong. He said his recruiting organization is working with Google’s software engineer steering committee to figure out how the company can refine its interviewing process.
“Given we all work hybrid, I think it’s worth thinking about some fraction of the interviews being in person,” Pichai responded. “I think it’ll help both the candidates understand Google’s culture and I think it’s good for both sides.”
Ong said it’s also an issue “all of our other competitor companies are looking at.”
A Google spokesperson declined to comment beyond what was said at the meeting.
Other companies have already shifted their hiring practices to account for AI cheating.
Deloitte reinstated in-person interviews for its U.K. graduate program, according to a September report.
Anthropic, the maker of AI chatbot Claude, issued new guidance in its job applications in February, asking candidates not to use AI assistants during the hiring process.
“While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process,” the new policy says. “We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate ‘Yes’ if you have read and agree.”
Amazon is also taking steps to combat AI cheating.
The company asks that candidates acknowledge that they won’t use unauthorized tools during the interview or assessment process, spokesperson Margaret Callahan told CNBC.
Chungin “Roy” Lee, a 21-year-old student at Columbia University, is the founder of Interview Coder, a startup that makes software to help computer programmers cheat in job interviews with the help of AI.
Courtesy of Chungin Lee
‘F*ck Leetcode’
If you visit InterviewCoder.co, the first thing that greets you is large gray type that reads “F*ck Leetcode.”
Leetcode is the program used by many tech companies to evaluate software engineers for technical roles. Tech companies such as Meta, Google and Amazon use it to keep tabs on the thousands of job applicants they evaluate.
“Every time I mention interviews, I get frustrated comments about Leetcode,” wrote Ryan Peterman, a software engineer at Meta, in a newsletter posted on Substack in December. Peterman said Leetcode problems are purposely designed to be much harder than what software engineers would do on the job. Leetcode is the best tool companies have to filter hundreds of applicants, Peterman wrote.
Coders said they hate Leetcode because it emphasizes algorithmic problem-solving and asks applicants to solve riddles and puzzles that seem irrelevant to the job, according to those CNBC spoke with as well as comments CNBC found from engineers across various social media platforms. Another downside is that it sometimes requires hours of work that may not result in a job offer or advancement, they said.
Leetcode served as Lee’s inspiration for building Interview Coder, he said. With the help of AI, he said, he created the service in less than a week.
“I thought I wanted to work at a big tech company and spent 600 hours practicing for Leetcode,” Lee said. “It made me miserable, and I almost stopped programming because of how much I didn’t like it.”
Lee’s social media posts are filled with comments from other programmers expressing similar frustrations.
“Legend,” several comments said in response to some of his X posts. Others said they enjoyed him “f—ing with big tech.”
Rival software Leetcode Wizard was also inspired by distaste for Leetcode.
Isabel De Vries, Leetcode Wizard’s head of marketing, told CNBC in a statement that Leetcode-style interviews fail to accurately measure engineering skills and fail to reflect actual daily engineering work.
“Our product originates from the same frustrations many of our users are having,” De Vries said.
Leetcode did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Henry Kirk, a software developer and co-founder of Studio.init in New York, is considering moving job interviews to be on site in response to software engineers using AI to cheat in virtual interviews.
Photo by Krista Schlueter for Inc. Magazine
When Kirk, of Studio.init, posted on LinkedIn in February to vent about his frustrations with AI cheating, he received nearly 200 comments. But most argued that employers should allow candidates to use AI in the hiring process.
“Even the SAT lets you use a calculator,” said one comment. “I think you just make it harder to succeed on purpose when in the real world Google and gpt will always be at my fingertips.”
Lee promotes Interview Coder as being “invisible to all screen-recording softwares.” To prove its effectiveness, he recorded himself passing an Amazon interview and posted the video on YouTube. Amazon and the other companies that had made offers to Lee then rescinded them.
Lee got hundreds of comments praising the video, which YouTube removed after CNBC reached out to Amazon and Google for this story. YouTube cited a “copyright claim” by Amazon as the reason for removing the video.
“I as an interviewer am so annoyed by him but as a candidate also adore him,” former Meta staff engineer Yangshun Tay, co-founder of startup GreatFrontEnd, wrote in a LinkedIn post about Lee and his video. “Cheating isn’t right, but oh god I am so tired of these stupid algorithm interviews.”
After YouTube removed the video, Lee uploaded it once again.
Cheating as a service
Lee said he never planned to work at Amazon, Meta or TikTok. He said he wanted to show others just how easy it is to game Leetcode and force companies to find a better alternative.
And, he said, he’s making money in the process.
Interview Coder is available as a subscription for $60 a month. Lee said the company is on track to hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue by mid-May.
He recently hired the internet influencers who go by the name “Costco Guys” to make a video marketing his software.
“If you’re struggling to pass your Leetcode interviews and want to get a job at a big tech company, you’ve got to take a look at Interviewcoder.co to pass your interview,” the Costco Guys say in their video. “Because Interview Coder gets five big booms! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boooooom!”
Leetcode Wizard bills itself on its website as “The #1 AI-powered coding interview cheating app” and “The perfect tool for achieving a ‘Strong Hire’ result in any coding interview and landing your dream job at any FAANG company.” Leetcode Wizard charges 49 euros ($53) a month for a “Pro” subscription.
More than 16,000 people have used the app, and “several hundred” people have told Leetcode Wizard that they received offers thanks to the software, the company told CNBC.
“Our product will have succeeded once we can shut it down, when leetcode interviews are a thing of the past,” De Vries said.
Lee said he’s moving from New York to San Francisco in March to continue building Interview Coder and start working on his next company.
Kirk said he understands software engineers’ frustration with Leetcode and the tech industry. He’s had to use Leetcode numerous times throughout his career, and he was laid off by Google in 2023. He now wants to help out-of-work engineers get jobs.
But he remains worried that AI cheating will persist.
“We need to make sure they know their stuff because these tools still make mistakes,” Kirk said.
Half of companies currently use AI in the hiring process, and 68% will by the end of 2025, according to an October survey commissioned by ResumeBuilder.com.
Lee said that if companies want to bill themselves as AI-first, they should encourage its use by candidates.
Asked if he worries about software engineers losing the trust of the tech industry, Lee paused.
“Hmm,” he mumbled.
“My reaction to that is any company that is slow to respond to market changes will get hurt and that’s the fault of the company,” Lee said. “If there are better tools, then it’s their fault for not resorting to the better alternative to exist. I don’t feel guilty at all for not catering to a company’s inability to adapt.”
Meta‘s Facebook’s influence remains strong globally, but younger users are logging in less. Only 32% of U.S. teens use Facebook today, down from 71% in 2014, according to a 2024 Pew Research study. However, Facebook’s resale platform Marketplace is one reason young people are on the platform.
“I only use Facebook for Marketplace,” said Mirka Arevalo, a student at Buffalo University. “I go in knowing what I want, not just casually browsing.”
Launched in 2016, Facebook Marketplace has grown into one of Meta’s biggest success stories. With 1.1 billion users across 70 countries, it competes with eBay and Craigslist, according to BusinessDasher.
“Marketplace is the flea market of the internet,” said Charles Lindsay, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Buffalo. “There’s a massive amount of consumer-to-consumer business.”
Unlike eBay or Etsy, Marketplace doesn’t charge listing fees, and local pickups help avoid shipping costs, according to Facebook’s Help Center.
“Sellers love that Marketplace has no fees,” said Jasmine Enberg, VP and Principal Analyst at eMarketer. “Introducing fees could push users elsewhere.”
Marketplace also taps into the booming resale market, projected to hit $350 billion by 2027, according to ThredUp.
“Younger buyers are drawn to affordability and sustainability,” said Yoo-Kyoung Seock, a professor at the College of Family and Consumer Sciences at the University of Georgia. “Marketplace offers both.”
A key advantage is trust; users’ Facebook profiles make transactions feel safer than on anonymous platforms like Craigslist, according to Seock.
In January 2025, eBay partnered with Facebook Marketplace, allowing select eBay listings to appear on Marketplace in the U.S., Germany, and France. Analysts project this will drive an additional $1.6 billion in sales for eBay by the end of 2025, according to Wells Fargo.
“This partnership boosts the number of buyers and sellers,” said Enberg. “It could also solve some of Marketplace’s trust issues.”
While Facebook doesn’t charge listing fees, it does take a 10% cut of sales made through its shipping service, according to Facebook’s Help Center.
Marketplace isn’t a major direct revenue source, but it keeps users engaged.
“It’s one of the least monetized parts of Facebook,” said Enberg. “But it brings in engagement, which advertisers value.”
“Marketplace helps Meta prove younger users still log in,” said Enberg. “Even if they’re buying and selling instead of scrolling.”
By keeping users engaged, Marketplace plays a key role in Facebook’s long-term strategy, ensuring the platform remains relevant in a changing digital landscape.