Before "app stores" there were retail stores, and the cut was worse because there was a publisher involved.
We didn’t magically jump from only buying things in stores to only buy things from an App Store. Companies could and still do sell through their own website and through other places.
And it fucking sucked. Finding apps was hit or miss, there was no guarantee an app would run on your device model, and payments were ridiculous. Apple's App Store is far from perfect but it is vastly better than the absolute clown shoes of buying mobile apps for pre-iPhone mobile platforms.
Further, since most things were shareware, you could just _test_ the software on your machine ahead of time.
iPhones nowadays are much closer to functionality and power to (or significantly eclipsing) normal PCs that people have.
And the distribution of software for normal PCs has none of the issue you describe.
A) The presence of licensing software is irrelevant to the existence of something between a big box store and the App Store. Talking about the ecosystem as if people did not sell software electronically before the App Store is simply disingenuous.
B) Times have changed, it's easier to handle that stuff yourself using free software or with software packages that take less than a 30% cut.
C) You know what didn't need that licensing software? Free and/or OSS software. That simply isn't an option on iOS. Further, even if you wanted to enforce that on your paid software you may have used a publishing company, but you weren't artificially limited to a single one.
Then you also had to pay into a marketing fund for those big full color inserts in the Sunday paper if your software was sold at the big box retailers.
You also had to eat the cost of returns of unsold inventory after you issued a new version.
Or do they mostly just support PayPal, Square, Amazon Pay or direct credit card billing?