Software was around for over 10 years before you could buy it. When you bought the hardware, you just got the software on it. Programs were just there. This was an obvious thing to all the early nerds getting their new computer. Par for the course like laces on new shoes.

Then in 1969, IBM unbundled it. This was an industry-defining game changer. Suddenly, software was detached from machines and sold separately. Programs went from a giveaway with the machine to THE product for machines.

And only 21 years later did someone think to run the move in reverse.

And Bill got filthy rich doing it.

In 1990 Microsoft was losing. WordPerfect had 60% of the word processing market. Lotus 1-2-3 was the OG killer app for PC; spreadsheets.

And brilliantly, Microsoft said no. No, we’re not going to compete with a better word processor or sheet. Why go 1v1 when you can change the rules and go 1v4?

So they did, and set out to dominate with a box: Word + Excel + PowerPoint together for $895, when Word alone was $495.

Nobody really switches for a slightly better product. Not worth the hassle. But, for three products at 60% off? Well…you don’t need more story time. Who’s Lotus?!

The moral of the story is unbundling creates industries and bundling decides who wins them. After Microsoft did it, a lot of others copied the move. But the copy cats were rich companies. You needed Microsoft’s catalog, Amazon’s Prime, Disney’s library.

The last idea we chatted about here was the new empty distribution channel that just opened up… the chat window in Claude/GPT and the very very early AI app stores available to builders.

Today, we’re talking about a second distribution door opening. It’s not available yet, it’s got nothing to do with AI, and its massive by default.

Apple is about to allow anyone of any size to cross-bundle their apps together and sell them as a collective suite. And the first bundle formed in each niche, through alliance, will probably get to be that niche’s default stack.

IMO, it’s in the follow through. Today’s idea will have you talking to other founders and devs about packaging your products together, and those talks happen on calls, where the who-gets-what details are said out loud.

Granola is how I run every partner and sponsor call for this newsletter as a one-man shop. No bot joins; it takes my notes off device audio while I stay in the conversation, and afterwards I can ask the chat “what exactly did we agree on pricing” and get the answer with receipts. A partnership is a hundred small agreements. Keep all of them.

🥷 When Apple opens cross-developer bundle requests late this summer, be first to package your subscription with the 2–3 apps that share your user’s exact ritual, and become the default stack of that ritual before anyone else files.

Guys, I’m honestly excited writing this. It actually reminds me of junior school at lunch when people were picking who they wanted to be on their teams for whatever game we were about to play. This is that, except hopefully this email is your nudge to start picking your teams before recess comes around so you’re ahead.

Because Apple has told us we’re getting two new formats very soon and there absolutely will be a first-mover advantage here…

Just think about the awesome marketing this opens up for small teams. “We think our app’s great. But you know what’s better? Our app plus these three, for the same price.” Indie devs get to stay in their lanes and still show up to the customer as one uniform offer, the way only Microsoft and Co. could before.

This is really arming the rebels IMO and I’m here for it.

Cross-bundles are a brand new thing to IOS, but there’s a running precedent in the Apple ecosystem worth looking at. Setapp has been doing cross-dev subscription bundling on the Mac since 2017, with 250+ apps for one subscription.

They way they do it is a revenue split, taking the users revenue for the month or year and diving it by the apps they actually used. Plus 20% extra if you brought the subscriber in yourself.

Builders join because it puts them in front of users who would never have searched for them.

And the retention side is just as juicy as the reach side. We’ll get to the numbers, but first a very quick word from our friends at Attio...

The difference between “I DM’d some founders on LinkedIn” and a locked partnership by the time this channel opens up is the same as any sales motion: a pipeline with stages, context, and follow-ups that actually happen.

Attio is where I run my system. For example, you add your 10 candidate apps as a list, and its research agents pull who builds them, how they monetize, and what changed lately, before you send your first message. Then every from there is on the record that grows. It’s the CRM Granola, Modal and Wispr run on. You?

It’s a fair read to say that bundles are a promotion. A discount. And maybe even that a discount cheapens the product, and is that worth it? My two cents as a builder, I could not care less if that’s true or not.

In WW2, England, France, the Soviets AND America bundled up if you will to beat Germany in Europe. The allies would not have cared if anyone said that doing so discounted the power of their armies up against one army…winning was winning.

Reaching customers and getting them to hang around after joining with the tsunami of new products that launch and look the same everyday is the single hardest part of the game right now, and this gift from Apple is a distribution weapon with perfect targeting.

A bundle places your product in front of the paying users of an adjacent product, at their moment of maximum openness, endorsed by an app they already trust.

That’s the promise of paid acquisition except the targeting is real—these people clearly have a need for this complementary app and are willing to pay. Plus the CAC is $0.

This is a neat consumer-stack moment. Bundling has typically been how big players squeeze small ones out of categories. This flips it into how small players can squeeze against big ones. You stay in your lane, your partner stays in theirs, and you show up to the customer with uniform positioning—one no-brainer offer with one story about a whole ritual.

Your win is literally your partner’s win with interests that are quite literally perfectly aligned.

And bundled together, four single-purpose apps feel like a platform to the user, with the value and the stickiness of a suite, without any of you having to become a platform company.

A good place to look for real numbers on how bundling impacts retention is in streaming. Take the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle.

Together, the bundle has 80% retention at M3.

Alone, Hulu 56%, Disney+ 56%, Max 54%

This cross-company bundle even beat Netflix who are kings of this retention with 74%. Monthly churn on Disney’s triple bundle runs 3% vs 4.5% for Disney+ alone.

Why is simply because canceling a standalone sub is one easy decision you can make if you’re feeling a pinch of the wallet or bored with the app, but a bundle is a deliberate downgrade of three things mid-use. A bigger decision. The bundle moves your product from “is this worth it?” to “is losing all of this worth it?” A much better question to be on the right side of.

And I also picked streaming as an example here because it’s a great showcase of what should pair with what and why.

Disney+/Hulu/Max is a good bundle because they share a ritual—the evening on the couch flicking between apps and categories trying desperately to find something to watch while eating your way through an entire bag or Doritos before finding what you want to watch.

These are not vaguely complementary things. And I think the golden bundle is products with shared/similar rituals, but different steps.

Journaling + sleep tracking share the 10pm wind-down before bed.
Recipe planner + grocery list + macro tracker share one Sunday.
Photo editor + preset store + portfolio builder share one shoot.
Budget tracker + subscription canceller + net worth share one payday.
Language learning + travel phrasebook share one trip.

If your candidate partner app doesn’t have proximity to the same moment as you, the discount I think is less likely to save the bundle at cancel-review time.

Easy to have missed this and I did until researching, but In June, Apple launched Personalized Collections. These are App Store recommendations generated from what’s already installed on your phone, showing you apps that pair with your existing workflow or interests.

In other words Apple’s engine is already mapping at OS scale which apps belong to the same ritual for you.

A cross-dev bundle is just the monetized version of the pairing that engine is about to recommend anyway. You’re not here inventing some adjacency. When you pick the right partner you can just claim one Apple has already measured with data and handed to you. The bundle that matches the algorithm’s real pairing data and leans into what Apple thinks overlap gets the most likely momentum.

This is the obvious question…what does the user see? How does this fit into the UI, what is the experience, etc? Is it in the UI of the app or outside in the store?

I don’t know exactly. This is what/all I can find.

It seems like it will be in the App Store, with bundles having their own product page, with an icon auto-generated from the first four apps (max 10 in the box), and one rule that tells you how the UX thinks: for subscription bundles, subscribing in any one app must unlock all the others at no extra cost. One buy and everything opens.

It’s TBC if cross-dev bundles land only their own storefront pages like the above, or as offers inside each partner’s paywall. My take is the former to start, but it will expand to also be the latter. The WWDC session shows the App Store Connect side, and you can build against the Bundles and Suites API in Xcode 27 today.

Two things I want want to—not deal breaking to me but definitely something I care about—are unknown right now. First, how revenue gets split between partners in the bundle, and second, how Apple’s commission works.

Before these details though, there’s nothing stopping you from starting partnerships— you just won’t know who gets paid what yet.

However, that’s not a bad thing though and can actually be part of your move—negotiate your own model with partners now, i.e using Setapp’s model (70% pooled, distributed by usage; bonus for whoever sourced the customer) as the reference point. Or whatever else you can thinking of.

He who takes the lead has the power. If you’re the one sending the DM, taking the call (bonus if with Granola) and driving the deal (bonus if with Attio)—you will in all likelihood be leading the convo and coming with with a fair, pre-thought split. You become the bundle’s organizer and the organizer sets the terms.

And there’s a stick you can take with you along with the above bag of carrots… Apple has told us that live apps in saturated categories (dating, wallpaper, simple timers, you get it…) can be removed if they’re not updated or getting new downloads. Fine, that named list is narrow today and you might not have an app in said categories. But as is often the case, that clause is a starting pint. It already has grown to include more types of apps.

This is Apple’s saying “Hey guys, too much AI crap is being launched without care, so we’re not just going to reject new apps, but if you don’t care or people don’t care about your live ones, we’ll remove those too.”

The macro here is a) Apple is doing housekeeping on their shelf to remove slop and b) giving devs new distribution tools to keep themselves on it.

Nobody has done this exact play yet because it’s not live yet. But there are examples of this bundling idea..

In May 2010, five indie games almost nobody could find (World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru, Penumbra) went on sale as one pay-what-you-want box.

138k buyers, ~$9 average, $1.27M in one week, and buyers even chose how the money split between the devs and charity. The genius was that five tiny audiences pooled into one event big enough for the press to cover, and every dev walked away with four other fanbases.

And they still do this with new games.

Takeaway: a bundle can be a launch moment none of you could generate alone.

Guillaume Moubeche bootstrapped lemlist (cold email), then acquired Taplio and Tweet Hunter which did LinkedIn and Twitter tools because his user’s ritual (B2B prospecting) spans three channels, and owning the whole ritual beats owning one step. They have their own power stack now; from building to buying

Five products with tens of millions in ARR. No capital raised. You don’t need to acquire your ritual-mates anymore; a bundle gets you the same coverage.

Takeaway: map the ritual moment; then own or ally with every step of it.

You know that YC sales advise that’s having a moment on social now? It says all else being equal, people buy from their friends. So make all things equal, and then make a lot of friends.

I’ve found this very true in the newsletter world. Before any platform had actual features for it, newsletters grew each other by trading audiences and suggesting newsletters to their reader. Recommendation helped me reach the first 20,000 of you to this very newsletter.

The platforms then productized it: Substack’s recommendations network drives half of all new subs on Substack, and they’ve even run experiments like the “Everything Bundle” where writers sell their paid pubs as a set with others.

When a behavior is that effective informally, platform support turns it into an arms race where early movers keep the compounding. Look at Lenny, absolute behemoth because of compound recommendations giving him distribution from all the newsletters helping him with distribution.

That’s exactly the phase the App Store is entering.

Takeaway: when a platform productizes an underground growth channel, the users of the underground version win the land grab.

….

› beehiiv has recommendations and bundling built in. They take 0% of what you earn, and have the most stacked set of creator tools for newsletter operators. Your app needs a bundle; but your audience needs a list. Start one on beehiiv

The 2008 shelf rewarded whoever showed up with an app.
This shelf rewards whoever shows up with friends.

Go find your ritual-mates, and shake on it. 🤝

p.s. If you read this and make go make a bundle partnership, please tell me. I’ll feature your bundles here in front of 60K people for free and even make a video.

I’m on YouTube and TikTok now—hit subscribe 🙂

› The primary: Apple’s tells us about bundles and suites. → Apple Newsroom (6 min)

› The mechanics: the WWDC session showing how Bundles and Suites work in App Store Connect. → WWDC26 Session 210 (20 min)

› The precedent’s economics: how Setapp splits revenue across developers by usage, the model to steal for your partner talks. → Setapp docs (4 min)

› The churn evidence: Antenna on why bundles retain like nothing else in subscription land. → Breaking Through with Bundles (8 min)

🛠️ A tool I found — Similarweb’s app audience overlap. It shows which apps get used more than average by the people who use yours: the closest public thing to the adjacency graph Apple is computing and a decent shortlist-builder for bundle partners. → Find your ritual-mates

📺 A video I loved — “Unbundling IBM Freed the Software Industry”: the 1969 decision and how one pricing announcement invented the industry we work in.

📬 A read I enjoyed — Commoncog’s case study on how Office won the suite wars → Microsoft Office — Suite Success