99% of the payment activity I do on my phone (buying retail goods, travel arrangements, paying invoices) has no additional cost.
Fair enough. It might not be consequential for you, the fact remains Apple took 30% of every dollar you spent on the app store. This, after you paid a premium for Apple hardware. I'm happy the walled garden with a toll is worth it for you. All I'm saying is, others might not agree with that if they knew. Just look at the push back again tariffs as an example.
The only things I’d really miss on a phone ecosystem is like, game emulation and some more esoteric network data/file management functions. These are things that are almost inherently outside the range of interests for the vast majority of people and the main reason they’re restricted is because they’re so piracy adjacent that it’s basically impossible to extricate them from association with a whole bunch of technically illegal use cases.
Little wonder then, that both the App Store proprietor AND App Store vendors would have an interest in locking those out to maintain the health of that platform as a viable place to run a business through.
That being said I won’t purchase an apple device again if this one croaks
They really want to though. Maybe consider that.
I do not see any indication that Apple wants to get involved in adjudicating payment disputes for physical goods and services. That is high cost, high liability, low margin work. They seem to be perfectly happy letting the existing banks (aka card issuers) handle that, and getting a 0.15% cut for allowing their credit cards to use Apple Pay.
Apple has restricted themselves to being the payment infrastructure for only digital goods, and I assume that is because that is the cheaper, more scalable option.
As a side note, in the US, the proportion of sellers willing to eat the credit card fees has gone down every year, and seemingly at an accelerating pace. I have winnowed down my credit card usage to retail goods/restaurants/travel, because almost everyone else wants payment via ACH/Debit/Zelle/other option that avoids credit card fees, so I would be surprised if Apple would ever want to enter this market, given that even the 2% credit card fee transactions are not able to compete.