30% is completely uneconomic and drives all of the profit to the platform owner. That's why were seeing so many acquisitions.
The problem here is with the 30%.
The answer is very simple - commissions before Apple's 30% were 50%-70%. That's why Jobs conducted that presentation with slide regarding with 30% fee - it was unprecedent for those times.
Also there is also another question - how did you calculate that 5-15% is reasonable? You need to have solid arguments to defend your position. But no one provided - even Epic's lawyers such data. Also most of apps in Apple's App Store are free, so Apple is paying for the whole development/maintenance of infrastructure (delta updates etc.)
Economies of scale alone indicates that if they could do the store at 30%, they could do it for far less when scaled up.
Finally, they are rather near brick-and-mortar markups for a lot of things despite not having all the extra overhead.
So as Apple stated in court docs - it's symbiosis between company, developers and users. If iPhone were bad people wouldn't buy them and developers wouldn't create apps with bad conditions in economic terms.
> if they could do the store at 30%, they could do it for far less when scaled u
Since they aren't monopoly (court conclusion after TRO hearing and on and after preliminary hearing on September 28th 2020) and we are on free market there is no reason to discuss their fee. Moreover they didn't upped it. And never did from App Store launch in 2008, only lowered for subscriptions after 1 year from 30% to 15%.
Developers can stop learning Objective-C/Swift and switch to Android-whatever on their career start if they feel bad about industry-standard 30% fee. But developers won't because Apple's user base is paying money and not sideloading pirated versions like on Android.
Also business and investors don't care about Android, like Clubhouse - for start-ups only iOS matters on first years.
So what we see? Developers who make tenths of millions (Epic Games with Tencent) want free access for Apple's user (install) base for free. There is a word for this - parasitism.