Phil Schiller did not leave Apple over burnout alone. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the longtime executive stepped back from running the App Store in part because new CEO John Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to improve the store’s margins and bring in more recurring revenue, and Schiller wanted no part of it.
Schiller, 66, believed that pushing harder for profits from the App Store would only increase conflict with governments and developers, so he chose to step down rather than carry out a strategy he doubted, Gurman reported on September 6. There was no big fight over the direction. He simply did not want to be the one implementing it. A desire to spend more time with family and on philanthropy played a part as well.
The App Store generates more than $30 billion a year and has been a magnet for legal and regulatory pressure for years. Epic Games sued Apple in 2020 over its in-app fee system. The monopoly claims were dismissed and the judge largely ruled in Apple’s favor, but the company was still ordered to let developers link to external payment options, and the legal fight continues. Apple has also adjusted App Store terms in the European Union to appease antitrust officials, and it proposed taking a 15% cut of purchases made outside the store in August. Schiller led the company’s response to most of that, setting policy and revenue share rates as lawsuits and new rules landed.
Schiller has been at Apple since 1987, with a four-year break, and took over the App Store when it launched under his leadership in 2015. He had run it as an Apple Fellow since 2020, after handing the marketing job to Greg Joswiak. A 2024 Wall Street Journal report said he was still working nearly 80 hours a week in the Fellow role. He was also the primary decision-maker on approving or rejecting controversial apps, a job that put him at the center of nearly every developer dispute of the last decade. Colleagues credit him with introducing many of Apple’s most important products on stage, from the original iPhone through the iPad and multiple Mac generations, alongside Steve Jobs.
Who runs the store now
Day-to-day App Store operations move to Carson Oliver, a 14-year Apple veteran who has spent his entire tenure in the App Store division, reporting directly to Cue. Ann Thai, who handles app distribution tools and third-party marketplace work, now reports to Oliver. Apple Arcade head Alex Rofman also reports to him. Leadership of Apple’s product events goes to Nola Weinstein, Schiller’s deputy since 2023, reporting to communications vice president Kristin Huguet Quayle. Weinstein’s first show was the September 9 keynote, the first major launch Apple has run without Schiller’s involvement in the events team.
The App Store itself moves from the marketing organization back into Cue’s services division, where it sat until 2015. Cue emerges with a larger territory under Ternus, and insiders see Schiller’s remaining Apple Fellow role, with unspecified projects, as a step toward eventual retirement.
| Role | New owner | Reports to |
|---|---|---|
| App Store operations | Carson Oliver | Eddy Cue |
| App Store division | Services organization | Eddy Cue |
| Product events | Nola Weinstein | Kristin Huguet Quayle |
| Schiller | Apple Fellow, no operations |
The timing matters
The reshuffle landed two days before Ternus took over as CEO on September 1, following Tim Cook’s 15-year run. Cook becomes executive chairman and said in his final memo that he would miss the work but felt enormous comfort in Ternus’s leadership. It is one part of a broader generational change. Chief operating officer Jeff Williams retired in December after 27 years. Environment chief Lisa Jackson and general counsel Kate Adams also announced departures in December. Jennifer Bailey, who built Apple Pay, retires in October after more than 20 years. Vision Pro vice president Paul Meade left for OpenAI in June, and the Vision Pro team has since lost around 100 employees. Ternus inherits a company whose senior ranks have thinned faster than at any point in recent memory, and he must repopulate them while delivering his first product cycle.
Schiller’s exit also removes the person who personally decided which controversial apps got approved or rejected and who negotiated App Store policies with regulators and developers through the most litigious period in the store’s history. That judgment now sits with a services organization whose mandate, per Bloomberg, is to make the same business more profitable. The store’s cut of developer sales has survived court challenges so far, but every margin improvement increases the incentive for developers to route around it, and every routing-around case invites another regulator.
There is a historical irony in the destination. Cue ran the App Store before Schiller took it over in 2015, when the responsibility moved to marketing. The store has changed enormously since, in scale, in legal exposure, and in the breadth of disputes it attracts. Handing it back to services concentrates payments, subscriptions, advertising and distribution under one roof, which is efficient for a revenue push and riskier for the relationship with the developer community that Schiller personally managed.
The September 9 event gave the new team its first public test. Ternus unveiled the iPhone 18 Pro, AirPods 5, Apple Watch Series 12 and the $1,999 iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable. The stock drifted lower through most of the 80-minute presentation, and the product story dominated coverage. But the quieter story from that week is the one Gurman reported: the person who built Apple’s relationship with developers stepped aside because he disagreed with where the money strategy was heading. Developers watching App Store margins climb under Cue will know who would have argued against it.