😸 Apple wants a bite of your app

gm legends. It’s Sunday.

This week: Apple floats a 15% commission for external purchases from iOS apps, Grok wants you to hire its bot, three new games that don’t look like normal games, and how to tell whether you’re legally running a companion chatbot (you might be surprised).

We are not a companion chatbot, legend, but this newsletter will keep you company. Read on.

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

This week, Apple proposed new commissions for anytime someone buys something via an external link inside an iOS app. The standard rate would be 15%, though small business developers (which we believe includes apps from devs who net less than $1M) would pay just 5%, and people in Apple’s news, video, and mini apps partner programs would pay 10%.

Before you balk at those rates, they might actually be a blessing. Apple has spent much of the 2020s fighting with Epic Games in court over its 27% commission for external purchases made via the app; those have been paused since 2025 due to court proceedings.

The proposed rates come out of separate proceedings in the same case. (It’s all very complicated.) The upshot, though, is that you might eventually start paying Apple a piece of whatever you earn on third-party purchases. But those will be lower than Google Play’s commissions, which are a standard 20% and 15% for apps enrolled in special programs.

In the meantime, enjoy the 0%, just like these recently launched iOS apps:

• Port22 takes all the agents running on your Mac and lets you keep tabs on them from your iPhone. If they need something, your phone will buzz. 

• SoloUno is a self-help tool for stopping nail biting, hair pulling, and other things you don’t want to keep doing to your body. Instead of shaming users for slip-ups, it praises progress.

• Appllama isn’t actually an iOS app—it helps you build them. It canvasses the top-earning apps and recommends design elements for yours.

SpaceXAI has a new launch! No, not a rocket: Grok Bot, a virtual colleague designed to work just like any other teammate. But unlike an actual human teammate, Grok Bot won’t microwave fish in the company breakroom. 

It’s not the only AI colleague out this week. Here are a few more:

• Munder Difflin counts The Office as inspiration, but your AI agents will be inspired by you. Or, actually, a clone of you that acts as boss when you’re not around.

• AI Group Call puts six voice agents on the line in the hopes that instead of agreeing with you (and praising your great instincts), they’ll disagree with each other—helping you pressure test possible solutions.  

• AgentConnect takes the problem of everybody at work using their own agents and gets them talking and collaborating on the tools your team already uses.

by Mona Truong, Murror*

California's SB 243 took effect this year. The definition is broader than the word "companion" sounds, and most of what it asks for is stuff a decent builder would want to ship anyway.

If you're building anything where a person talks to your AI about their life — a journaling tool, a coaching app, a "supportive" assistant, a character — there's a law worth reading this month, and it's probably not the one you think. Not the EU AI Act. A California statute called SB 243. It took effect January 1st, and I'd bet most makers in this space haven't checked whether they're inside its fence. The reason to care isn't that the penalty is scary (though it's real). It's that the law quietly wrote down a definition of "companion chatbot," and the definition is broad enough that a lot of products land inside it by accident.

Here's the definition, roughly: an AI that gives adaptive, human-like responses, is capable of meeting a user's social needs, has some anthropomorphic feel to it, and can sustain a relationship across multiple sessions. Read that again as a builder, not a lawyer. "Human-like responses" is every LLM. "Sustains a relationship across sessions" is any product with memory. "Meets social needs" is the part people wave away — "we're a productivity tool, not a companion" — but if your users keep coming back to talk and feel a little better after, the label on your landing page won't be what decides it. There are carveouts (pure customer-service bots, game NPCs that can't discuss mental health, plain voice assistants), but the middle is fuzzy on purpose, and fuzzy-on-purpose is exactly where indie products live.

If you're in scope, here's what SB 243 actually requires.

*This is not legal advice.

Not everything needs to make you more productive, optimize your output, or solve a nagging life problem. You can make something just for fun. Here are three games that launched this month on Product Hunt and brought us joy:

Patience: I had this idea in 2013. Push notifications were new, endless scroll had just arrived, and what stuck with me was watching people pay real money for cosmetic items that gave them no gameplay advantage — purely to be seen at the top of something. So the question I couldn't drop: would people spend time instead of money? Not time as a side effect of playing, but time as the actual price. Would someone sit and do nothing for fifteen minutes to be number one on a leaderboard? (Jordan Shaw)

Prompt Golf: My friends and I were having a debate on how well we understand LLMs and one thing led to another, I ended up making this fun silly idea to flex your prompting skills, formatted like Golf. You get a vanilla AI model to chat with. You have to get it to respond with the target word/phrase using the least characters and messages. (Jugal Mistry)

Yamanote 3D: I started Yamanote 3D because I wanted the sounds and atmosphere of a train journey in the background while studying or working. Instead of using a looped video, I wanted something I could actually explore, so I began recreating Tokyo’s Yamanote Line as a live 3D experience in the browser. You can walk through an E235 carriage, take a seat, watch the city, listen to announcements, and get off at stations. There are no missions or scores. It is meant to be a calm place you can leave running. (Bruno Paiva)