Why Buying Crypto Works Differently on iPhone

Tap Buy inside a crypto wallet on an iPhone and the app does something no shop would dare: it shows you the door. Safari opens, a checkout page loads, and the purchase finishes somewhere else entirely while the app waits for you to come back. Android users mostly get the same ritual, and nobody designed it to be elegant.

It exists because of a number: 30.

The commission problem

Apple's App Store rules require digital goods and services bought inside an app to go through Apple's own payment system, which historically took a commission of up to 30 per cent. That model works for games selling extra lives. It does not work for crypto purchases, where the platform arranging your purchase might earn one or two per cent on the transaction. Handing Apple 30 per cent of a bitcoin purchase would mean losing money on every sale, and passing it on would mean quoting you a price nearly a third above market.

So wallet and exchange apps did the only thing the rules allowed: they left, and the purchase moved out of the app. The app shows the button, and the buying happens on a web page run by the platform or its payment partner. Your card details, identity checks and the payment itself all live in that browser flow. When it finishes, the crypto lands in the wallet address the app passed along, and you switch back.

Apple formalised the boundary in October 2022, when updated guidelines spelled out that apps could sell NFTs only through in-app purchase and could not include buttons or links steering users to outside payment methods. Crypto apps kept their licence to exist, with conditions: no mining on the device, no rewarding users with tokens for tasks, no hosting token launches.

What changed in 2025

The wall cracked in the United States first. In April 2025, a federal judge in the long-running Epic Games case found Apple had failed to comply with an earlier order and barred it from taking commission on purchases made through external links, or from blocking those links. Within days, Apple updated its US guidelines, and apps on the US storefront can now include a plain link out to an external checkout, without the commission and without the warning screens that used to sit in the way.

For crypto specifically, that meant US users started seeing purchase links inside wallets and NFT apps that would have been rejected a year earlier. The purchase still completes on the web, but the app can now take you there directly instead of pretending the page does not exist.

Two limits matter. The change applies to the US App Store, not worldwide. And it changed distribution, not product rules: the guidelines still prohibit on-device mining, ICO hosting and pay-to-earn token schemes, everywhere.

Europe took a different road

In the European Union, the Digital Markets Act forced Apple to permit alternative app marketplaces and third-party payment options from March 2024. In practice, most crypto apps in Europe still use the browser handoff, because building region-specific payment plumbing for each storefront costs more than the flow it replaces. The EU rules changed what is possible, but commercial gravity decides what actually ships.

What this means when you buy

The practical takeaways are short: first, being sent from an app to a checkout page is normal, not a red flag in itself. The page should sit on the payment provider's own domain, reachable over HTTPS, and the app should have told you whose checkout to expect. If a purchase flow ends somewhere you cannot name, stop.

Second, Apple Pay often works inside those checkout pages. The handoff moves the purchase out of Apple's commission system, not out of your phone's payment tools.

Third, expect the experience to differ by country for years. A US iPhone, a German iPhone and an Australian iPhone can all show different buying flows for the same app, each one shaped by whichever ruling or regulation reached that storefront last, and the crypto is the same. The doorway keeps moving.