Why? Do you know how the money is distributed when you buy groceries, when you buy a meal at a restaurant, when you buy your clothes, when you buy a book, etc? Does that get you riled up to not know? Why is it different?
It seems completely reasonable to me that the provider of a good or service should be able to communicate freely and directly with their customer about something as core to the transaction as their options for paying for the service.
[0] And even retailer isn't quite right. What the App Store does is less akin to the wholesale-retail model and more like the agency sales model.
App Store is not unique, it is a platform copied from other vendors such as Nokia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovi_(Nokia).
Users pay for the phones.
There is no 'merit' left for Apple (or Google) to collect fees or to impose rules.
As a consequence there are incentives for the stores to decrease the amount of money they make in the normal way and they instead try to find strange ways to make money that the mall doesn't get a cut of.
For example if you buy shoes at the shoe store they will send you new colorful shoelaces every month if you mail them money.
But every now and then a store will come up with clever new way to make money that doesn't give the mall its cut and then the mall throws the store out and leases its space to a competitor. Or just announces method X of making money also needs to give us our share.
If you want the analogy to make sense, let's assume there's exactly two places that sell shoes and they have a stranglehold on the market, and they both mark shoes up the same amount and far more than they would if there was competition between them on price, and they refused to allow any reference to nike.com and how you can get shoes far cheaper there on or in any of the packaging.
That would be a very dysfunctional market, and I think the reason would clearly be the anticompetitive practices that prevented competitors and that resulted from them not competing on price.
When people sell items through big box stores, those stores buy the items at wholesale. What happens if Apple changes from the 30% structure to a 50% wholesale/retail?
Fitness apps compete with gyms, movie apps compete with theaters, learning apps might even compete with schools, etc.. an OS provides the capabilities to do all of these things. I'm sorry, but your analogies make zero sense to me. Apple should be regulated at least the same way Microsoft was, and the Open App Markets Act does this, and I'm glad to see it. I don't think small changes like this are really the way to fix what's wrong with iOS and Android, even though the latter is more open.
App devs should have an honest conversation with the devs of pre-app days. You had to have a release completed so that it could be sent to the facilities to make the dis[c|k]s. These had to be way more complete than today with the ability to 100% re-download the actual product that has had extra time to complete. There's also the cost involved in getting those physical objects made. Today's app devs have it so much easier, and yet want so much more.
It's irrelevant how easy or hard developers have it, the consumer can pick if they want to pay once or have a subscription for the feature set they want in apps.
The closed nature is the only argument that carries water with me as far as being anti-competitive. Every business has to pay to have their product distributed, and the 30% just never sounded unfair to me.
Honest question.
So, all of that to say I'm used to getting 50% of the retail price by selling to wholesellers, so being able to have a 70/30 split being offered by Apple would be 20% increase in my earnings.
Allow alternate app stores, and you'll likely see as much competition on mobile as there is when comparing Itch vs. Steam.
Why are we trying to hold Apple to standards that we know are bad, but just happen to exist in the real world anyway?