Does this only makes sense if you assume payments are tied to the App Store? They aren’t.
If you remove payments from your list of motivations, what do you presume Apple’s motivation is to encourage apps to list themselves on the App Store and not a third-party marketplace?
Like literally the only participants in that business transaction are the consumer and the company, Apple does not even enter the picture.
It would be like car manufacturers charging you a percentage for going to the grocery store, because they provide a Private and Secure™ transportation platform.
Consumers will soon catch up, and if the EU does not put pressure on Apple about this, they definitely will.
Not exactly true, there are fragments of Apple intellectual property distributed with compiled binaries.
Which the annual tax (aka developer fee) presumably covers.
This is how it used to be, until Apple got too large and instead of being beholden to developers it flipped the other way around, and now releasing an app for Apple's platform is a supposed privilege.
Take the games industry, where developers and publishers are often given huge incentives by a platform (mostly consoles) to develop for that platform; because games developers are providing value for the platform owner by making the platform more attractive because it has more content options for the consumer.
Why is it so hard for people to wrap their heads around that concept.
Right, as an incentive. That's exactly right. Makers of other platforms chose a particular funding model to suit their commercial strategic environment, not because they were obligated to. Why should Apple be obligated to follow other (or even their own) prior business models?
> This is how it used to be
It really isn't. In fact this expectation of free full-featured developer tools for mainstream platforms is relatively new. https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-sets-pricing...
> Take the games industry
Sure. Remind me where I can download the free developer kit for the PlayStation 5? Remind me who I need to pay in order to distribute a PlayStation game?
Also if I bought visual studio, MS couldn't tell me what I could make my program do, or outright refuse to let people use my program.
In fact, Windows itself came with everything that you needed to build just about any userspace app in the box since Windows XP SP1 (the first one that included .NET Framework).
Similarly, I dream of going to Epic's website to download some Fortnite, maybe charge a thousand vbucks to mom's credit card if I'm feeling adventurous, and that has nothing to do with Apple or iOS.
This is how every single general-purpose computing platform (including Apple's MacOs) and the open internet has worked for multiple decades.
Some may be like Uber, turning the car into a taxi service, or like Turo, allowing it to be rented. Others may be independent mechanics that can work on the car perfectly fine without access to blessed tools.
There is no cost passed on to the customer because the car manufacturer does not enforce a percentage cut of Uber's or Turo's revenue.
That said, there is likely no perfect analogy in cars. We can instead turn to MacOs / Windows / Linux etc., general purpose computing platforms that do not suffer from a gatekeeper's stranglehold.
You can see where the lack of respect to IP rights leads to when it comes to current espionage claims between some of the world largest economies entangled in a myriad of IP disputes. Ultimately, the question I ask myself is: am I happy with unverified random parts I want to put in my car? Instead of having easy traceability and ability to sue for damages I now have to also vet provenance, authenticity and take on additional risk of an unvetted supplier that I often won’t be even able to sue.
This would be the developer buying a license to the SDK and documentation and then that would be it.
If you believe in that as a security measure, you could still have a signing requirement and apple could revoke trust on known-bad binaries. Which is probably what they will do.
If the developer needs to use Apple resources to track and manage said entitlements, and the consumer expects Apple to police bad actors, then are we asking Apple to do this for free on the bad actor’s behalf (oops, I didn’t mean to use your microphone, GPS, BLE in order to sell the info to an enemy state, law enforcement, angry ex!) or should the cost of said infrastructure be passed to the customer when purchasing hardware? OR does Apple wait until an application is exposed, generally through an echo chamber after the damage is done and is made aware of the issue?