What if a court forces Apple to allow app sideloading?
Forced sideloading guts Apple's ~30% take-rate, a services-margin hit concentrated in AAPL; the index/crypto-beta move is sympathy, not transmission. Analogue is the EU DMA sideloading mandate — real revenue leakage but gradual, with Apple recapturing fees via new terms (core-tech fee). Forward angle: the offsets (alternative-billing fees, security charges) blunt the hit, so the durable loser is the 30%-dependent payment rails, not Apple's whole P&L.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. US court compels Apple to permit third-party app stores and sideloading, gutting 30% commission revenue. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.