Bea Phi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
As Ternus Takes Over, the App Store Quietly Goes Back to Eddy Cue
On the day John Ternus became Apple CEO, Phil Schiller stepped away from running the App Store and product events, according to reporting not announced by Apple. The store is returning to Eddy Cue’s Services organisation, with Carson Oliver handling day-to-day operations.
A first day made of an email and a countdown
Ternus marked the handover with a memo to Apple's worldwide staff, quoted by AppleInsider and 9to5Mac. He thanked Tim Cook, welcomed his continuing presence as executive chairman, and pointed at the calendar: a "huge launch next week," he wrote, before adding that he was just as interested in what comes after it. Apple's next event is September 9, where Ternus is expected to introduce the iPhone 18 Pro.
Apple also refreshed its leadership page as the change took effect, with adjustments to Jennifer Newstead's government affairs title and rewritten biographies for Deirdre O'Brien and Johny Srouji. Housekeeping, but the kind that tends to precede structural moves rather than follow them.
Eleven years later, the store returns to services
Bloomberg reported on Monday that Schiller, an Apple Fellow since 2020, has given up day-to-day responsibility for both the App Store and Apple's product events. He remains at the company, on initiatives that have not been specified. Apple has not announced the change publicly.
Responsibility for the store moves to the services organisation run by Eddy Cue, with Carson Oliver — long the store's operational lead — handling day-to-day management. According to Bloomberg, Apple events pass to Nola Weinstein.
The symmetry is hard to miss. Cue ran the App Store until 2015, when Schiller took it over. Reporting lines at Apple are not usually symbolic, and this one puts the store back alongside iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV and advertising — the businesses that make up the services line Apple reports to investors every quarter.
The eleven years in between were the contested ones
Schiller inherited a store that was still mainly a distribution channel and hands over one that is a permanent legal file. During his tenure the App Store was the subject of the Epic Games trial and its anti-steering injunction, Japanese and South Korean legislation on alternative payments, and the European Digital Markets Act, which forced alternative marketplaces, third-party browser engines and a rewritten fee structure in the EU.
Schiller was the executive Apple put forward through most of it — in depositions, in developer-facing rule changes, in the arguments about what the commission actually pays for. Moving that portfolio under the executive who owns the revenue line is a change of framing as much as of reporting: the App Store is being managed as a business unit rather than as a platform-stewardship function attached to marketing.
Nothing reported this week changes App Store rules, commission rates or review policy. What changes is who owns the decisions. Developers negotiating terms, and regulators seeking a counterpart, now face services rather than a standalone fiefdom.
Maestri's exit has been running for two years
The same day, Bloomberg reported that Luca Maestri has left the corporate services role he took in late 2024 after a decade as chief financial officer. He is still on Apple's payroll and still teaches a single class at Apple University, but comes into the office roughly once a week. Current CFO Kevan Parekh has absorbed the corporate services portfolio.
Read alongside Schiller's move, a pattern is visible. Apple does not tend to announce departures; it thins responsibilities first. Maestri went from CFO to a vice-president role to a class and a weekly visit. Schiller went from senior vice-president of marketing to Apple Fellow with two major portfolios, then to a Fellow without them. Cook has moved from chief executive to executive chairman.
A staged retirement, not an exodus
The distinction matters, because the reflex reading of four changes in one fortnight is a leadership crisis. It is closer to the opposite. Apple's approach preserves institutional memory: people who have been at the company for thirty years remain reachable while the decisions move elsewhere. AppleInsider argued as much on August 30, before the Schiller report landed.
The cost is that decisions concentrate on fewer and newer shoulders precisely when the company is contesting antitrust actions on two continents, litigating against OpenAI over trade secrets, and absorbing the retreat of its spatial computing bet after the Vision team layoffs in August.
What to watch after September 9
The event is the first visible test. Ternus hosts a keynote whose production no longer runs through Schiller, presenting a foldable iPhone that has been in development for most of a decade. Apple has said nothing about further executive changes, and no departure date has been announced for Schiller or Maestri.
The structural detail to follow is narrower and more informative: whether App Store policy announcements — commission changes, rule revisions, regulatory responses — start carrying the services division's fingerprints. That is where a reporting-line change stops being an organisational chart and starts being a strategy. For the background on what the chief executive handover did and did not alter, our August 19 account of the transition remains the reference.