From 1 October, leaving Apple In-App Purchase drops a Small Business Program developer from 15% to 10% in the EU. On a 4.99 euro subscription, a processor's fixed per-transaction fee can eat most of that on its own - and your choice locks for 12 months.
Apple updated the Developer Program License Agreement on 18 August, and the new EU business terms go into effect on 1 October. The coverage I've read frames it as Apple finally opening up. That's true in a structural sense and mostly irrelevant to anyone running a small subscription app, because the interesting question isn't whether you can leave Apple's payment system. It's whether the arithmetic works. For most of us it doesn't, and it's worth being able to say why rather than just having a feeling about it.
From September 2026 you can't submit an update without saying whether your app has social media capabilities. Say yes and Apple applies a minimum 13+ rating and drops you into a Time Allowance parents can cap. The definition is broader than having a feed, and your secondary category is load-bearing too.
If you've shipped an update in the last few days you've already met this question. If you haven't, you will on your next one, and I'd rather you met it here than at 11pm with a release branch open.
Search Central states plainly that AI Overviews need no special markup, no AI text files, no schema. The one independent study of what users actually do is 18 months old and says a citation is worth a 1% click. Everything fresher is measured by the people selling the service.
It's Q4 planning season, which means a lot of small teams are about to write GEO on a budget line. Before you do, I'd spend twenty minutes on two documents, because they disagree with the pitch in a specific way.
The first is Google's own page on AI features and your website, in Search Central. It says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimisations necessary. Further down it's blunter: you don't need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files, or markup, and there's no special schema.org structured data to add. The whole page is a restatement of ordinary SEO fundamentals - be crawlable, be indexable, be useful, have your important content in text.
That's the platform saying, in its own documentation, that the product being sold to you does not exist as a distinct technical practice. You can decide Google is being coy. I'd just note that this is the one party in the conversation with nothing to sell you, and that it's the version I'd have to defend if I were wrong.
The Digital Omnibus pushed high-risk obligations out to December 2027. Article 50 transparency was not pushed anywhere - it applies now. And if your generative feature shipped before 2 August, your marking deadline is 2 December, twelve weeks out.
Every summary I read of the Digital Omnibus said some version of "Brussels blinks, AI Act delayed." That's accurate about the part of the Act most small teams will never touch, and misleading about the part most of us are already inside. I went and read the Commission's own pages this week rather than the coverage, and the gap between the two is wide enough to be worth twenty minutes of your time.
Enforcement on 30 September hits seven stores in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand. Not sideloading, not other stores. But registration is bound to your app signing key, and Google's FAQ says a lost one can't be recovered.
There's a version of this story going around that says Android is closing. Sideloading is dead, the open platform is over, verify or disappear. I went and read Google's own developer verification pages this week, because Murror ships on Android and I wanted to know what I actually had to do before the end of the month. The docs say something narrower than the panic, and in one specific place something worse.
Start with what happens on 30 September.
Enforcement begins for users installing from participating stores Google Play, HONOR App Market, OPPO App Market, Galaxy Store, Palm Store, V-Appstore and GetApps in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, on certified devices running Android 7 or higher. If you haven't verified your identity and registered your apps by then, they're blocked from installation for users in those regions.
The legacy "Block AI bots" switch is deprecated on 15 September, and mixed-purpose crawlers get folded into it. Googlebot, Applebot and BingBot are in scope. Opting out is one click and the window is 25 days.
Sometime in the last two years a lot of us flipped a switch in Cloudflare called "Block AI bots." It was one click, it was free, it was framed as protecting your content, and there was no reason not to. I did it. I never thought about it again.
When we first built Murror, we stored every journal entry forever. More data meant better emotional pattern detection, smarter insights, richer reflections.
Our AI kept getting better. Our users kept getting quieter.
For months, we celebrated our power users at Murror the ones journaling every day, sometimes multiple times a day. They had the highest session times, the most entries, the best retention curves. On paper, they were our success story.
Then we started reading what they were actually writing.
Everyone tells you to ship fast. Move fast and break things. Get to market before someone else does.
I believed this for a long time. When we were building Murror, speed was everything. We pushed features weekly, sometimes daily. We celebrated every deploy like a small victory.
