I own an app that pays social media celebrities to respond to fans, we pay them 60% of our profits. Apple broke their own app store rules stating we would be disqualified from IAP and forced us to use it. So after we pay out our partners of which our entire app exists, Apple are making 3x more money than we do from our own app. And take 2 months to pay us. Oh, and provide no transaction id's for unique customers so if one of them requests a refund or does a chargeback we have no way of tracking it back to his account. To say there's a culture of hatred towards Apple in our team is an understatement.

are you the guys who pay celebs to advertise that random social media app on their snapchat/instagram with taglines like "more on [social media app i've never heard of and a chance to talk to me"? really amusing tactics that abuse the core fanbase's rabid enthusiasm for content from their favorite personalities. i never considered that the appstore is probably taking a lot of money from you too

Eh, without the apps the phone wouldn't sell in those numbers. In their eyes they are dependent on the devs.

That may be true at first, but when they have a huge part of the market... they could argue: "without our customers, you wouldn't have that many users". Kind of like a chicken and egg situation. When they already have such a large slice of the pie, they start to care mostly about the bigger app developers, and the small ones are just something they need to show big numbers, but they are not that important anymore...

(Just to be clear: It's not that I think they are not important, it's what I perceive as their attitude when things like this happen)

They are dependent on developers as a whole, but not on any individual developers (with perhaps a few exceptions).

The iphone sold in those numbers even before there was an App Store.

No, it really didn't. The first iPhone was 2G and it was a year before the app store was available.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-ipho...