When Apple and Google pay you (and what they keep first).

Your first paid download lands, the dashboard shows the unit the next morning, and nothing reaches your bank for somewhere between two weeks and ten. Nothing is wrong with your account. Both stores pay on schedules that have little to do with the calendar on your wall, and several things come off the price before the remainder is even queued. Here is the whole path from a customer's tap to your statement, with dates.

Two commissions, and you have to ask for the smaller one

Both stores advertise 30 percent, and almost no indie developer should be paying it. Apple's Small Business Program cuts the commission to 15 percent if your proceeds across all your apps were under $1 million in the previous calendar year. It is not automatic: you enrol in App Store Connect, and until you do, every sale is billed at 30. Google's version has the same shape, 15 percent on your first $1 million of earnings each year and 30 percent above that, and it also needs opting in from the Play Console. Subscriptions are gentler on both sides. Google charges a flat 15 percent on all subscription revenue, and Apple drops to 15 percent once a subscriber has paid for a full year.

The commission is the part everyone knows about. It is not the first thing subtracted.

Tax comes off before the commission does

The price the customer sees is not the number the commission is applied to. In most countries the store is the merchant of record: it charges the customer, collects the sales tax or VAT, and remits it. Your proceeds are the customer price minus that tax, and then minus the commission. In Germany, where VAT is 19 percent, a €9.99 purchase contains €1.60 of tax. The store sets that aside, applies its cut to the remaining €8.39, and you are left with €7.13 at 15 percent or €5.88 at 30. Watch the proceeds column in your sales reports rather than the price column. The gap between them is tax plus commission, and it changes with every storefront.

Apple's month is not your month

Apple pays once per fiscal month, and its fiscal months are not calendar months. The fiscal year is 52 weeks split into four quarters of 13 weeks, and each quarter is one five-week month followed by two four-week months. Every fiscal month ends on a Saturday, and the year ends on the last Saturday of September.

The agreement you signed says payment arrives within 45 days of the last day of the fiscal month in which the sale happened. In practice it has been 33 days, consistently enough that third-party calendars publish the exact payout dates. So the wait depends entirely on where in the fiscal month a sale lands:

• A sale today, September 14, falls in fiscal September, which runs August 30 to September 26. Payment: October 29. Forty-five days.
• A sale on September 27 falls in fiscal October, a five-week month that runs to October 31. Payment: December 3. Sixty-seven days.

Two sales less than two weeks apart, paid five weeks apart. If you are forecasting cash from a launch, download the fiscal calendar from Payments and Financial Reports in App Store Connect and plan against that, not against the month on the sale.

Google pays on the 15th, for the previous calendar month

Google Play is simpler. Everything from the 1st to the last day of a calendar month, orders, refunds and chargebacks together, is paid out starting around the 15th of the following month, with a few more days for your bank to post it. A sale on September 1 and a sale on September 30 both pay in mid-October. Worst case is about 45 days; best case is about two weeks.

Minimums, and why a slow month rolls forward

Neither store pays every balance. Apple's default minimum is $40 per payment period, but for bank accounts in many countries, including the US, the UK, Japan and India, the listed threshold is two cents, which is effectively zero. If you do not clear it, the balance carries into the next period. Nothing is lost, it just waits. Google's threshold depends on how you are paid: $1 for local-currency payouts, $100 for USD wire transfers. Wire fees can swallow most of a small payout, so if you are on a wire, raise the threshold in your payments profile until the fee is a rounding error.

Apple also sends nothing until the Paid Apps agreement is signed, banking and tax forms are in, and, for some countries, monthly invoicing is complete. If any of those is missing, the balance quietly accrues and no payment is initiated. Do this before launch, not after the first sale.

One deposit, many currencies

You sell in dozens of currencies and get paid in one. Apple consolidates every storefront's proceeds into a single payment per fiscal month, converted to your bank account's currency at the rate its bank obtains, and lists the rate used for each currency in an FX Rate column on the Payments page. Google's local-currency payouts work the same way; USD wires arrive in dollars and your own bank converts them. The practical effect is that the estimated proceeds you watch every day and the amount that lands are never quite the same number. The difference is whatever the currencies did between the sale and the payment date.

Refunds come out of the next payment, and the stores handle them in opposite ways

On Apple, you never issue a refund. The customer asks Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com, and Apple decides. You are not asked for permission, but you can testify. For consumables and auto-renewable subscriptions, Apple sends your server a CONSUMPTION_REQUEST notification when a refund is requested, and you have 12 hours to reply with how much of the purchase the customer actually used. Miss the window and Apple rules without you. Either way you get a REFUND or REFUND_DECLINED notification afterwards, and a granted refund appears as a negative unit in your next report, with the proceeds you had earned on it coming back out.

On Google, you are the refund desk. Customers can ask Google directly within 48 hours of a purchase; after that, the store tells them to contact the developer, and you issue the refund from order management in the Play Console, in full, or partially for in-app purchases and subscriptions. When you refund, Google returns its service fee to you as well, so a refund costs you exactly what you were paid, not the customer's price. Refunds net against the same month's orders, and if they push your balance negative for more than 48 hours, Google debits the bank account it normally pays.

The one number in this pipeline you still control

Everything above happens after the sale, on a schedule you cannot move and at a rate you cannot negotiate. The part that is still yours is how many of the people who reach your listing decide to pay in the first place, and that is settled by the screenshots and the copy on the page. ShotCanvas is built for exactly that: import your screens, pick a template or let AI compose the set, and export pixel-exact frames for every App Store and Google Play slot.