Open Letter to Apple Leadership To: John Ternus, Chief Executive Officer Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Apple Developer Relations & App Store Small Business Review Teams
Subject: PCC & Developer Continuity: Implementing a Paid Tier for Private Cloud Compute (PCC)
Dear John, Craig, Greg, and the Apple Developer Relations Team,
I write to you as a new developer community member. While developing several Apple applications, I was glad to find deeply integrated applications through Apple Intelligence and the Private Cloud Compute (PCC) architecture that can be used to add features and capabilities to these applications. By eliminating early-stage cloud API friction, you gave indie developers the exact "on-ramp" needed to build incredible, localized AI tools.
However, the current off-ramp mechanism built into the App Store Small Business Program enrollment is actively penalizing developer success. Your documentation outlines a rigid, unyielding pipeline for growing applications:
"If any app subsequently exceeds the 2 million first-time downloads threshold, or the developer is no longer enrolled in the App Store Small Business Program, the developer will be notified and must migrate to an alternative solution within 6 months."
While I know that it is highly unlikely that my downloads will exceed 2 million (shoot for the moon though, one never knows), since Apple does not distribute its frontier-tier server model weights, developers who reach this milestone will be forced to migrate their core features onto third-party infrastructure like AWS, OpenAI, or Microsoft Azure. This policy introduces a severe, counterproductive paradox into the Apple ecosystem:
- This will force successful devs to move to third party AI providers and away from Apple's tools. I am sure this is not a desired result at Apple. Or, it will have a chilling effect: developers will not use PCC if this a potential hurdle they might have to jump in the future. Why bother at all to begin with if this might be the end result.
*Forced Migration Breaks Developer Continuity: Forcing growing apps off PCC means developers must completely swap out backend configurations. Instead of focusing on enhancing their apps for your new hardware, developers must waste critical engineering cycles rebuilding infrastructure on third-party clouds.
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Abandoning the Privacy Promise: Apple built its reputation on an uncompromising commitment to user privacy. PCC extends the secure enclave to the cloud. Forcing a developer to move their traffic to a third-party server means forcing users to trust external corporate entities with data that could have stayed inside Apple’s secure ecosystem.
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The "Success Tax": For mid-sized developers, the transition is a massive financial cliff. A commercial AWS instance capable of running an open-weight equivalent model introduces steep fixed baseline costs.
My Proposal: A Predictable, Commercial Pay-As-You-Go PCC Tier after the limit, rather than an off-ramp to Apple's competitors: Instead of forcing growing developers onto AWS, Google Cloud, or OpenAI, Apple should allow developers to transition to a paid PCC commercial plan upon crossing the 2 million download or small business revenue thresholds.
Whether structured as a metered developer API cost or an explicit tier integrated into Xcode and App Store Connect, developers want the option to pay Apple directly to stay on your hardware. This achieves your goal of preventing data centers from becoming a subsidized utility while ensuring our apps don't break when they go viral. Apple has always championed the idea that the best experiences happen when hardware, software, and services are vertically integrated. Forcing your most successful developers to sever that integration and hand their infrastructure over to external cloud providers at the exact moment they achieve scale undermines the ecosystem you’ve worked so hard to build. Please give us a path to grow with Apple, not away from it.
Sincerely, The Apple Developer Community