I don't understand this argument. Would it apply anywhere else? Could some company sell houses where they demand 30% of the price of every appliance you buy? You're the housing company's customer so they're bringing you their customers apparently.
Could some car company demand 30% of all gas, tires, oil, and electricity? You're the car company's customer. Could a refrigerator company demand 30% of all groceries you put in it?
There have been laws that disallow you to limit customer choice. For one example, a company can't force you to buy 1st party parts for repairs
You're position seems to be if they can prevent people from doing something with their device they don't like and people still buy it then that's ok. So if a sofa manufacture found a way to prevent people of color from sitting on it and people bought it that would be perfectly fine by your position I guess. I could certain make a fridge that complained if you put something in it that had no RFID tag and that those tags must correspond to items they've licensed.
In any case, my position is, no company should have that kind of power, period. A house company shouldn't be able to decide who my guests are who what items I put in it. A fridge company shouldn't be able to decide what items I keep cold. A cabinet company shouldn't be able to to decide what I store in my cabinets. And a computer company should not be able to decide what I can run on my computer (smartphones are computers).
Apple has to pay to keep your app hosted in the store. They have to pay to check your app for safety. They have to pay developers to maintain the store. Your fridge doesn't have that. Your fridge manufacturer made something to host your food. It costs them zero dollars to perform the hosting. In fact, you have to pay another company (the electric company) that hosting cost. If a fridge manufacturer decided to become the electrical company, then it would make more sense.
Apple has to pay costs to maintain the app store, the operating system for the app store, and the hosting costs in-between.
This is mostly just arguing accounting, which is something Tim Cook admitted under oath that Apple doesn't do [1].
The benefit of such a simple fee structure is that it becomes insidiously difficult to ask questions and receive legitimate answers about equity. How much does it cost to host the app? To pay engineers & marketers to build security scanning and storefront features?
These are not questions we generally ask of private institutions. But Apple's products are decreasingly operating like a private institution; they're looking a lot more like a public institution; a critical platform that hundreds of millions of people worldwide rely on for productivity, entertainment, communication, and commerce. We do ask these questions of our governments; we want to know how much we're spending on things like the military, roads, NASA, because knowing these numbers is critical in assessing effectiveness and accountability.
Here's a question: Apple does invest some amount of money into application security scanning and reviews. Now there's an important domain; keeping your users safe. How much? We don't know. What we do know: They're REALLY bad at it. Inarguably, the worst in the industry; right down there with Microsoft Teams and Log4J. They keep many things quiet, but they can't keep that quiet. Are they spending billions, and seeing such poor outcomes? Are they spending thousands, and should be spending far more, but won't? We don't know.
This always leads to: If users had an issue with the platform, they would leave. Let's play in the space where this is true; where the smartphone market is full of fungible platforms (it isn't, but:). Would users leave if they knew just how bad the App Store & iOS was at keeping them safe? Many users don't even know what those two things are. But they still deserve to be kept safe; maybe even more-so than more experienced users like us. The onus is on Apple to keep them safe, and Apple has spent a decade failing at it. Where does the onus fall, then? To the void? It's reasonable to argue: Experts, and the Government. Someone needs to hold them accountable. If a bridge fails, injuring dozens of people, we don't say "well, they tried their best! just think on all the cars that were able to use it without it falling." Nor, do we expect drivers to do an engineering deep dive on every bridge they cross, so they can make an informed decision about which one they want to take to work today.
I won't argue Apple's safety record on absolute terms, but I am fully convinced that it is safer than the Android alternatives in the smartphone space. This is the one reason why even after I de-Appled my PC (sold the MBA and bought a made-for-linux laptop), de-Appled my cloud storage provider, and de-Appled my email, I still use an iPhone.
That totally happens by the way. When we built our house, we had to use bathroom supplier X and the builder took a cut (might very well be 30%). Same for the kitchen.
The builder brings in the customers, and the bathroom and kitchen suppliers seem to be happy to share a ~30% commission for it.
(note: this is in Belgium, but I assume similar setups are commonplace in other places)
There have been laws that disallow you to limit customer choice. For one example, a company can't force you to buy 1st party parts for repairs
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2018/04/...
You're position seems to be if they can prevent people from doing something with their device they don't like and people still buy it then that's ok. So if a sofa manufacture found a way to prevent people of color from sitting on it and people bought it that would be perfectly fine by your position I guess. I could certain make a fridge that complained if you put something in it that had no RFID tag and that those tags must correspond to items they've licensed.
In any case, my position is, no company should have that kind of power, period. A house company shouldn't be able to decide who my guests are who what items I put in it. A fridge company shouldn't be able to decide what items I keep cold. A cabinet company shouldn't be able to to decide what I store in my cabinets. And a computer company should not be able to decide what I can run on my computer (smartphones are computers).