The prices aren't invisible to the companies putting the app on the Google store. In principle they could try and use a different store with lower fees and reduce their prices for the same margins couldn't they?
$0.70 - App
$0.30 - Apple Fee
$1.00 - Total
However, I do agree. It should be shown to the user like this.
Another article [1] says 98% of developers in the Apple store would be below one million/year but also that that long tail generates only 5% of the store's revenue. There are a tiny number of apps that are enormous winners, games I assume, and there's everything else.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/18/data-shows-how-few-google-...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/18/21572302/apple-app-store...
So it's much better to earn 999k instead of 1.1 million...
I think both Apple and Google did that. It's a desperate attempt to avoid regulation IMO. I think both should be forced to facilitate competing app stores. There should be no mercy for them after a decade of anti-competitive price gouging.
Imagine you release your app, and you expect to hit a few thousands users... except those users are world-wide. Now imagine attempting to figure out how to process credit cards from 100 different countries, register your business enough to be able to file tax records for those 100 countries, actually file taxes for those 100 countries every year, etc. Sure $3,000 of your $10,000 went to Apple, Google Play or whatever, but it would have gone towards a huge number of other costs if you'd tried to go at it alone.
Epic store is an interesting example. They are losing massive amounts of money. We will see if that is sustainable or not.
At least from a consumer point of view, this doesn't seem to change the price much: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/why-lower-platform-fe...
If you buy a Google Android phone, you have the Google Play Store. That's it. Maybe you can install some other store but 99% of consumers will never do that.
On Apple, you have to use the App Store. It's the only game in town.
This is why its a monopoly. They could charge 50% and devs would still be forced to do it. The developers and people who complain about this just want to be able to use other payment providers in their apps. They don't want to be forced to use Google Play or Apple. Let other payment providers in so they can compete on fees, customer satisfaction, chargebacks, security, etc.