> For most purchases made within its App Store, Apple takes 30% of the purchase price. No other transaction fee — in any industry — comes close.
This is a straight-up lie and Epic, being in the gaming industry, knows it. Steam takes the same 30% (unless you're huge) and is Epic's direct competitor on PC. Not to mention every other gaming platform[1].
[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/07/report-steams-30-cut...
And Epic managed to fight this by offering a store that takes a lesser maragin. Something Epic or anyone else is ever allowed to do on Apple due to how they deliberately built the product.
If anything, the Steam situation is the perfect example of how broken the mobile world is when it comes to enabling competition.
Otherwise we end up with many app stores, which requires users to care about where they get candy crush... You can pay more or less at each store, and have different probabilities of picking up some terrible malware based on your decisions. On the flip side, we might see lots of apps using weird disallowed OS functionality in off-brand stores, leading to a second round of innovation in apps.
Realistically, it ends with many stores of varying quality and mark up. People brainwashed enough to pay the apple tax will probably continue paying the apple tax, for the most part. But the overall game changes substantially.
Apple is doing much more than providing transaction services in exchange for their cut.
Whether or not what they do is actually worth 30% is up for debate (IMHO), but it's dishonest to say that that their cut is merely a "transaction fee".