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It’s still unclear to me why Apple should have any limits in what rules they set for their store. Don’t publishers have the option to skip Apple’s store and sell in other ones?

I mean this isn’t price gouging generators during a winter storm. This is video games and apps.

What stops publishers from simply shrugging, walking away, and letting Apple users miss out?

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It's still unclear to me why anticompetitive behavior is so hard to understand for people here. Free markets don't exist. Stop pretending they do. Apple has a crazy amount of power over companies selling apps on their platform. Power that would easily be considered a monopoly and anticompetitive if brought to court in, say, Germany. The fact that Apple doesn't own the smartphone market completely is irrelevant. What matters is their potential and real power to unilaterally decide on contract/business matters affecting any number of companies that use their platform.

Because it accounts for a huge portion of the mobile market. This is exactly what antitrust is for. When you have large swaths of a market controlled by so few, you don’t actually get proper free market dynamics. Antitrust cases like this put limits on few large players that abuse their positions and generally promote and incentivize further development in the market.

If Apple was forced to allow 3rd party stores or even forced to allow apps to be transparent to their users about pricing, it would allow room for more consumer choice.

The only problem here is that you have to show Apple changes practices to become anti-competitive once achieving large marketshare/control.

It's OK to have a monopoly, it's not ok to abuse it under U.S. law.

Apple has actually loosened restrictions over time as the platform gained marketshare/size. And when Apple created the App Store they more than doubled how much developers took home from gross revenue (70-80% of revenue went to distributors/retail prior to the App Store).

The only anti-competitive area I'm concerned about is Spotify/streaming services. I think Apple is being overzealous here.

Everything else appears to be a game/software distribution norm.

Epic pays 30% on Android, Nintendo, Xbox, and Playstation markets.

Steam needs 15% and GOG needs 22% of gross revenue from games to break even operationally.

Stripe charges about 3% of gross revenue for transaction services.

The 30% doesn't seem that high when you consider those factors:

15% just to keep the lights on (Steam break-even royalty rate). 3% for transactions at minimum (e.g. Stripe fee) Ongoing R&D costs of maintaining iOS/iPhones (more technically and cost intensive than Xbox and Playstation combined).

The kit for iOS development is remarkably cheap too, $99/yr developer account (mostly a gatekeeping path to keep malware out), and $700 for an M1 Mac Mini (If you don't want to just use a VM from AWS for < $100 yr).

I think they can do better for small-time app developers (the 15% fee has helped), but I still feel like these people should STFU and look up how expensive Gaming Console, Embedded SoC, and IoT dev kits are in comparison (And god, don't look at the agreements we sign on embedded hardware dev kits). I wish I only had to spend $99 a year, and be able to use $100 used cell phones to test my software on.

> It’s still unclear to me why Apple should have any limits in what rules they set for their store.

It's an exploitative monopoly. That's more than enough reason to place severe limits on it.

One of the things that came up in the trial was that Apple's share of Fortnite was more than $100 million in a single year. Which means that Epic's earnings from Fortnite on iOS for that year were more than $334 million.

That explains why Epic doesn't want to walk away.

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