> And how is that relevant for phones?
Epic Games makes and publishes games for phones. Fire tablet apps and its app store are just Android apps, it's just that Amazon doesn't sell phones so they don't brand it like that.
> A 30% savings in the cost to go after 70% of the market is not enough of a motivation? New games/apps are coming out all of the time. Why not do web first if web technology is good enough and capture both the desktop and Android?
> In most of the rest of the world, iOS has much less market share than in the US.
That's why I precisely said "in terms of revenue". iOS has the users with the most spending even though they have vastly less marketshare. Apple has been able to evade antitrust action for this reason but mobile developers know that the majority of B2C revenue typically comes from Apple platforms, so they have a stranglehold there.
> On my phone right now, I pay for ... outside of the App Store.
Again with the "reader app" exemption. Yes, the largest content brands & services can sometimes get consumers to use alternative billing methods. Apple's heavy anti-steering rules (which are still heavy and obviously malicious compliance after the recent court case) still make it difficult, assuming it's even possible because most non-megacorp apps are not delivering content they are delivering functionality which has no "reader app" exemption.
Spotify used to use in-app billing but fortunately for them they became one of the biggest streaming services in the world so they have some leverage now.
> The first B2B SaaS company I worked for after mobile became a thing had two developers writing the front end apps for both iOS and Android using native tools.
A B2B SaaS company I worked for also tried to do the same thing and it worked out terribly, they ran away from native apps. Companies often make mistakes. It's not surprising, the ROI on native is almost never there which is why it's extremely rare in B2B. Hey, I can generalize from my one experience too.
That's not even the argument here, just because it doesn't require a trillion dollar market cap doesn't make it a business decision that Apple should be able to force. Profit margins on B2B are generally way higher than B2C, the way B2C companies typically achieve high profitability is via ads on valuable content which is a tough ask for smaller companies.
But let's really be clear here: just because your company could do it doesn't mean others can or should.