How Muse could be coming next for Apple's golden goose
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Meta's new consumer artificial intelligence agent, Muse, is expected to play havoc with online subscriptions. Now Wall Street thinks it could be coming next for Apple's revenue streams. Analysts see Apple's entire application exchange platform as a target of potential AI "disintermediation," allowing agents to interfere with regular payment streams and developer incentives. The revenue hit to Apple could be as much as $10 billion, analysts at Needham conjectured on Thursday. "We calculate that, if 40% of AAPL's $123 [billion] of services revs in FY26A were App Store revs, and just 20% of App Store revs moved to META's 0% fee Muse Connectors platform, AAPL's revs would fall by $10B and EBITDA would fall by $7.5B, which would threaten AAPL's growth rate and valuation multiple (since annuity revenue streams command higher valuation multiples than hardware)," Laura Martin at Needham wrote. Meta could also siphon off developers from Apple's ecosystem, Martin said. "META stated that it received [more than] 1,500 developer applications within 168 hours of launching its Muse Connectors platform, and we believe AAPL will face developer defections unless it improves its economics for developers," she said. Online subscription reviews by AI agents such as Muse could save consumers – and cost businesses – a lot of money, analysts say. "Agents that actively audit subscriptions and recommend cancellations could make it easier for consumers and small businesses to eliminate low engagement software products that may have previously been forgotten about," analyst Tal Liani at Bank of America wrote Thursday. "If consumers and small businesses adopt personal AI agents at scale, it could introduce incremental churn headwinds." That's especially true because consumers tend to forget about apps and services that they've subscribed to but use infrequently. U.S. adults waste an average $252 a year, or $21 a month, on unused subscriptions, technology publication CNET found in its most recent annual subscription survey .