The external purchase link is not one rule. It is a different rule in every storefront.
An external purchase link is a link inside your iOS app that sends a customer to your own website to pay. Whether you need Apple's permission to put one there depends on the storefront the customer downloads from, and there are four different answers. On the United States storefront you need no entitlement at all. In the European Union, Japan and Brazil you enable one, and Apple still takes a cut of what you sell. In every other storefront the link is not allowed. Every rule and figure below comes from Apple's own App Review Guidelines and its regional support pages, read on 10 October 2026. Most people arrive at this question while adding payments.
What follows is the storefront list, what Apple charges when the money never touches its system, what you actually have to turn on, and the sheet the app must show before it opens the link. Then the reason almost everything written about this goes stale within months, including the name of the entitlement itself.
Start hereThe short version
Permitted in four places, and free in only one of them.
The default is no. Guideline 3.1.1(a) says that in all storefronts except the United States storefront, apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase. Every exception to that has been carved out one region at a time, by a regulator or a court, and each carve-out came with its own price list.
The United States storefront is the exception with no paperwork. Apple's guidelines say the entitlements are not required for developers to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action in their United States storefront apps. Apple made that change on 1 May 2025 and said in its developer news that the guidelines were updated for compliance with a United States court decision. That is a different kind of permission from a business term, and worth re-reading on the day you ship.
The European Union, Japan and Brazil work the other way round. There is an entitlement, you enable it, and Apple charges a store services commission of 15% on what you sell through the link, reduced to 10% in the cases below. Only sales made within 7 days of the link tap count toward it.
Does the external purchase link entitlement exist in your storefront?
It depends on four answers, and the one that applies is decided by the customer's storefront rather than by where your company is registered. A company in Stockholm selling to someone downloading from the United States storefront is under the United States rule for that sale. The same app sold to someone on the German storefront is under the European Union rule, and needs the entitlement with the German country code in it.
In the European Union the thing you enable is now called the StoreKit External Purchases or Offers Entitlement. Apple's support page lists 29 valid country codes for it, and adds that Iceland and Norway are valid only for music streaming apps. It needs iOS 26.2 or iPadOS 26.2 at a minimum, and macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS 26.6. Japan uses the same entitlement with the single country code jp, and Apple says the entitlement profile may only be used in apps on the Japan storefront on iPhone running iOS 26.2 or later. Brazil uses the country code br and needs iOS 26.5 or later.
Brazil carries one condition the other two do not. Apple's Brazil support page says that if you provide an alternative payment option, you are required to present Apple In-App Purchase as an option too, on every screen where digital goods and services are merchandised, and at least as prominently as any other payment option. Plan the paywall layout around that rather than discovering it in review.
Outside those four, the answer is no, and the guideline is blunt about it. There are narrower survivors in Apple's StoreKit documentation for anyone whose case fits: a music streaming entitlement for the European Economic Area, an older link entitlement documented for the EEA and Russia, and the reader app account link covered further down. None of them is a general permission to sell on your own site.
Apple, App Review Guidelines, 3.1.1(a) Link to Other Purchase Methods, read 10 October 2026
Check your storefront
What you may do, where your customer downloads from
The storefront is the customer's, not your company's. A Stockholm company selling to someone on the United States storefront is in the United States column.
Can you link out?
Allowed. Buttons, external links and other calls to action are not prohibited on this storefront.
What you turn on
None. Apple states the entitlements are not required for United States storefront apps.
What Apple charges
Apple publishes no store services commission page for this storefront.
Minimum OS
No entitlement, so no minimum OS tied to one.
Read from Apple's guidelines and regional support pages on 10 October 2026. Check the date before you rely on any of it.
What does Apple still charge when the money never touches its system?
A store services commission, and it is the figure people miss. In the European Union, Japan and Brazil, Apple charges 15% on out-of-app offers, reduced to 10% for participants in the App Store Small Business Program, the Mini Apps Partner Program and the Video Partner Program, and for auto-renewable subscriptions after their first year. All three support pages carry the same sentence about scope: only sales made within 7 days of the link tap are subject to this commission. A customer who taps your link, thinks about it for a fortnight and then subscribes is outside the window.
Paying inside the app with your own processor is priced differently again. Apple's EU page lists 20% for sales processed by alternative payment processing within the app, and 10% at the reduced rate. Japan lists 21% for the sale of digital goods or services, including alternative payments within apps, and 10% at the reduced rate, with a separate 5% payment processing fee that applies only when Apple In-App Purchase handles the payment. So Apple's own billing is the commission plus the processing fee, and your processor is the commission plus whatever your processor charges you. All of these figures were read on 10 October 2026, and Apple's commission is the part that has moved most often.
Run the arithmetic before you build any of it. A 15% store services commission plus a payment provider's own percentage plus the cost of handling refunds, chargebacks, sales tax in every market and the support email that follows a failed card is not obviously cheaper than letting the store bill. The honest comparison is against in-app purchases, where the store collects the money, remits the tax it is responsible for, and absorbs the failed payment.
The United States storefront is the one place where the sum is different, because Apple publishes no store services commission page for it. That absence is the whole reason people care about this subject. It is also the least settled part of it, so treat the guidelines and your own licence agreement as the source rather than anybody's summary, this one included.
Apple, payment options on the App Store in the EU, commission tables read 10 October 2026
What has to be requested, and what sheet must the app show?
Less of a request than the old articles suggest. Apple's current EU, Japan and Brazil pages describe enabling the entitlement in Xcode's Capabilities library or on the developer website, configuring the App ID in Certificates, Identifiers and Profiles, and then adding the key to your project entitlements file. The key is com.apple.developer.storekit.custom-purchase-link.allowed-regions, its type is an array of strings, and its value is the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code for every region you support. That is a build setting, not a submission.
The agreement is the part that is actually requested of you. The Account Holder has to agree to the updated Apple Developer Program License Agreement, and the EU terms now live in Attachment 14 of it. That attachment superseded both the Alternative Terms Addendum for Apps in the EU and the StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement (EU) Addendum. Apple updated the agreement on 18 August 2026 and the new terms took effect on 1 October 2026. Older, narrower entitlements did use a form: the Netherlands dating app entitlement asked for your bundle ID, your payment service provider's name and website, your website domain and your customer support URLs, which is the process most articles still describe.
Then the disclosure sheet, which is not optional and not yours to word. Its job is to tell the customer they will be transacting with you and not with Apple. In iOS 26.2 in Japan and iOS 26.5 in Brazil, Apple says you must include an in-app modal sheet of your own, built to the design specification it supplies. From iOS 27.2 you call showNotice(for:) on ExternalPurchaseCustomLink and the system draws the sheet for you, with a control that lets the customer stop seeing the reminder before later purchases. The call returns continued or cancelled. On cancelled, you do not open the link. Check ExternalPurchaseCustomLink.isEligible at runtime first, because a false there means the API is not available to that app on that device.
The obligation that outlives the launch is reporting. Apple expects monthly reports of your external purchase transactions, within 15 days following the end of the calendar month, through the External Purchase Server API, covering refunds, corrections, renewals, one-time purchases and failed transactions. You collect and remit the applicable taxes on those sales yourself. Apple invoices you monthly, and its Japan page gives 30 days from receipt to pay. Budget for a reporting job before you budget for the saved commission.
Why does almost everything written about this read out of date?
Start with the name, because even that has moved. The phrase people search for is the StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement, and Apple's guidelines still use it in the plural when describing the family. The thing you actually enable for the European Union, Japan and Brazil is now called the StoreKit External Purchases or Offers Entitlement, with a different key. The older boolean entitlement, com.apple.developer.storekit.external-purchase-link, is still in Apple's documentation with availability back to iOS 15.4, which is why searches keep landing on it and why half the internet is describing a key you no longer set.
Then the dates. The United States rule changed on 1 May 2025 through a court decision. Japan's options arrived with iOS 26.2. Brazil's arrived with iOS 26.5. The EU terms were rewritten on 1 October 2026, which retired two addenda that a great deal of published advice is built on. Any article that does not say when it was checked is describing one of those earlier states, and you cannot tell which from the outside.
The third problem is that three different mechanisms share one informal name. Paying with your own processor inside the app, sending someone out to a browser to pay on your site, and a reader app linking out so an existing customer can manage an account are not the same thing, are not priced the same, and are not permitted in the same places. Guideline 3.1.3(a) covers the last one: reader app developers may apply for the External Link Account Entitlement to provide an informational link to a site they own in order to create or manage an account. Creating an account is not buying.
Getting this wrong is a rejection rather than a warning, and the guidelines say what happens at the far end: if your app engages in misleading marketing practices, scams or fraud in relation to the entitlement, your app will be removed from the App Store and you may be removed from the Apple Developer Program. It is worth reading why apps get rejected before you ship a link out, because payment rules are the section reviewers test hardest.
Four things people call an external purchase link
| The mechanism | What you enable | Where it works | What Apple takes | Disclosure sheet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alternative payment inside the app | StoreKit External Purchases or Offers Entitlement | EU, Japan, Brazil | Commission on the sale, 20% in the EU and 21% in Japan at the standard rate | Yes |
| Out-of-app offer with a tappable link | StoreKit External Purchases or Offers Entitlement | EU, Japan, Brazil, plus the United States with no entitlement | Store services commission of 15%, 10% reduced, on sales within 7 days | Yes |
| Reader app account link | External Link Account Entitlement | Reader apps, and not required on the United States storefront | Nothing, because it may not sell anything | No |
| Apple In-App Purchase | None | Every storefront | Apple's standard commission, reduced for small businesses and for subscriptions after year one | No |
Where this lands if a builder generated your app
The entitlement belongs to your App ID and the agreement belongs to your Account Holder, so nothing about this moves because an agent wrote the code. App Review Guideline 4.2.6 is the reason it stays with you: apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service will be rejected unless they are submitted directly by the provider of the app's content. You submit, so you are the one who agrees to the payment terms behind the submission.
Newly is an AI app builder. You describe an app in plain English and it writes a real React Native and Expo project you own, with two-way GitHub sync, then uploads iOS builds to TestFlight and publishes to Google Play internal testing or builds a standalone Android APK. It does not submit to the App Store for you, for the reason above. It is paid from $25 a month, with no free tier. Ask it for a paywall and what you get is store billing wrapped in RevenueCat, which is the route that needs no entitlement in any storefront.
That is the sensible default, and it is worth saying why. A link out is a business decision with an engineering tail: an entitlement per region, a disclosure sheet, a server reporting job every month, tax you remit yourself, and a commission that only looks like a saving once you have priced all of the above. Generating the app does not shorten that list. Ship on store billing, watch what you actually sell, and revisit the link when the commission on real revenue is worth the work.
Questions people ask about external purchase links
It is permission from Apple to put a link inside your iOS app that sends a customer to your own website to buy digital goods or services. Apple's App Review Guidelines, guideline 3.1.1(a), describe it as applying for an entitlement to provide a link in your app to a website the developer owns or maintains responsibility for in order to purchase digital content or services. The guidelines also say the entitlements are limited to use only in the iOS or iPadOS App Store in specific storefronts, so the first question is always which storefront you are selling into. Read on 10 October 2026.
Ship the app first, then decide who bills
Store billing works in every storefront with no entitlement and no monthly report. Launch on it, find out what people buy, and price the link out against real revenue instead of a blog post.
Start building