Meta Steers Users Away From New Apple Fees in Latest Spat Between Tech Giants

The Facebook parent published instructions encouraging advertisers to use a workaround to avoid paying a 30% service charge to Apple.

The workaround applies specifically to “boosted posts," a type of advertisement Meta has long offered for both Facebook and Instagram that users can purchase directly on their smartphones to amplify the reach of their content. Later this month, Meta will begin charging U.S. advertisers who continue to purchase boosted posts from apps on iPhones and iPads a 30% service fee that will be paid to Apple. The increase in pricing comes as a result of a change announced in late 2022 by the iPhone maker.

“We are required to either comply with Apple’s guidelines, or remove boosted posts from our apps," Meta said in a blog post on Thursday. “We do not want to remove the ability to boost posts, as this would hurt small businesses by making the feature less discoverable and potentially deprive them of a valuable way to promote their business."

To get around paying this service charge, Meta is encouraging its advertisers who rely on boosted posts to now head to the websites of Facebook and Instagram from their computers or web browsers on mobile devices.

As part of the pricing changes, Meta said it would also require advertisers that decide to keep buying boosted posts from their Apple mobile devices to prepay for the advertising campaigns they choose to run. Meta won’t require advertisers who buy boosted posts from its websites to prepay, and advertisers who decide to prepay from Meta’s websites won’t be charged the Apple service fee if they then boost posts within their Facebook and Instagram iOS apps, the company said.

Meta and Apple bickered for years over the treatment of boosted posts, according to a 2022 report by The Wall Street Journal. Meta contended that boosted posts should be considered a form of advertisement in part because they are often used by small businesses to reach bigger audiences. Apple argued that they should be considered in-app purchases for which it charges a fee of up to 30% through its App Store. Apple changed its App Store rules in October 2022 to treat boosted posts as in-app purchases, entitling the company to a 30% cut of Meta’s revenue from boosted posts.

The two companies have been in conflict for more than a decade. Most notably, Apple in 2021 introduced privacy changes to its mobile devices that Meta later said would cost it $10 billion in lost revenue in 2022. The tensions between the two companies have renewed in 2024 on a number of fronts.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in February criticized the plan Apple announced in January to allow third-party app stores on its mobile devices to comply with a new European law. Meta had been preparing for years to introduce its own app store for Apple mobile devices, according to a report in January by the Journal, but after seeing what the iPhone maker announced, Zuckerberg said Apple’s offering was so onerous and at odds with the intent of the European law that he thought it would be very difficult for any company to seriously entertain it.

“I don’t think that the Apple thing is going to have any difference for us because I think that the way that they’ve implemented it, I would be very surprised if any developer chose to go into the alternative app stores that they have," Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg kept the hits coming on Tuesday, when he uploaded his review of Apple’s new Vision Pro headset to his Instagram page. The social-media baron said he thought his own company’s Quest 3 device was the better product. Zuckerberg criticized the Vision Pro’s $3,500 price tag and what he said was a limited app selection, lack of comfort and wired battery pack.

“There are a lot of people that just assumed that Vision Pro would be higher quality because it’s Apple and costs $3,000 more, but honestly, I’m pretty surprised that Quest is so much better for the vast majority of things that people use these headsets for, with that price differential," Zuckerberg said in the video.

Write to Salvador Rodriguez at salvador.rodriguez@wsj.com