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I use as little Apple technology as possible, using frameworks like https://www.electronjs.org/ - to reduce my dependency on Apple.

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.

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In my personal opinion (and I recognise that this is a controversial view on Hacker News) Apple should be entitled to the same thing Epic Games asks for—which is the right to decide how much their intellectual property is worth when used by other developers to build commercial products.

I think the issue is that once you become a monopoly (as Apple's store is: users choose--for any number of reasons where this is frankly likely only one small one where they might be as pissed off as anyone else--between two stores that also-frankly have similar terms anyway, meaning they don't really have a choice anyway, but then developers can't choose: they are held hostage to access that market), you lose some of the "rights" you have as there is no way to compete on terms. If Apple were to separately say "you can either build on UIKit and Metal, in which case we take 30% of your revenue... or you could use HTML and OpenGL, in which case, well, good luck?" then I think a lot of developers would avoid Apple's frameworks... and if they could explain why to the user--that every time you buy a movie from us you are spending an additional $1 for the UI framework Apple is providing--they would agree wholeheartedly, as that shit adds up fast.

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