"The App Store makes it simple for users around the world to discover, download and enjoy your apps. "
Discovery is very much part of the deal.
Nobody was paying Apple 30% because that was cheaper than distributing yourself. They paid 30% because without paying that their app wouldn't get discovered, by design.
Now Apple has decided 30% only buys you the privilege of being able to pay more to be discovered.
You are crazy if you think this is a way for Apple to do anything other than capture some of the existing market of app ads, which has been incredibly lucrative for Facebook. They have so many ways to get more information about how useful an app is likely to be for you that they don't use, they don't need another signal.
Maybe not anymore but the app store was launched in 2008. If you look at the percentage a writer or a band makes from a physical book resp. studio album, 50% actually looks very optimistic. Don't forget, there were multiple layers involved, including shipping, wholesalers, retailers, etc. and everybody wanted a cut. There's a reason desktop software to this day has a much higher price anchor than mobile!
My point was that "distributors" or retailers never took 50% as the original post suggested.
If you believe that the reason desktop software has a higher anchor price point than mobile is the multiple layers, please explain why the price point on the Steam store is so much higher than the app store.
Your Steam analogy is flawed due to selection bias - Steam is about games, and games are more similar to movies than apps. People want entertaining content (and a good amount) for that initial price.
Does Steam allow for freemium? What about ad-driven games?
The mobile carriers often charged upwards of that rate to game publishers.
Actually, the point of the app store was distribution. That's what the 30% cut was for IIRC. And that's how they sold it, by comparing it to the 50% and more cut that older, traditional channels took at the time of introduction. I don't think they ever even thought about discovery, which would explain why the app store has become such a mess in the first place!
> And now they want to charge me for promoting my app in their store. This should just be a built-in part of the App Store story for the customers. This is why Apple customers pay a premium. Instead Apple sees an opportunity here to make even more money off me / the app authors?
I don't think making money is the main consideration for Apple here. Advertising can also play a useful role as a market mechanism (keyword: "price discovery"). For example, if you spend money to promote your app, you signal confidence in its value proposition. Also, you might be more selective in your targeting. Etc. So the money itself is almost incidental, what we really want here is the information aggregation and surfacing function of a competitive market, the most efficient matching of offers (app makers) and bidders (app users) across an extremely heterogeneous collection of agents.
But it needs to be set up correctly (this is what all the mechanism design literature is all about). Hopefully it is, but I suppose we'll just have to wait and see.