You can't not use Apple's infrastructure; they don't let you. You could get billing, upgrades, push notifications, etc, from somewhere else for cheaper if it was possible.

"the Netflix iOS app no longer lets you sign up for a subscription. Instead, new users are booted into the web browser to sign up on Netflix.com. Since this transaction happens outside the app, Netflix doesn’t have to give Apple its 30 percent cut.." ... "This approach is even more extreme than what Spotify does on iOS. If you sign up for a subscription via Apple’s platform, the cost is $12.99 per month to cover the Apple fees. If you sign up online, Spotify only charged $9.99. It has even reached out to customers to help them transfer their membership outside of Apple’s sandbox..." https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/276066-netflix-experiment...

Try doing that as a non-multi-billion dollar company and your app gets rejected. The guidelines specify that in-app-content MUST use the Apple in-app-purchase system

Being Netflix has its benefits, because smaller devs definitely got their app booted out because they tried the same workaround. There cannot be any kind of linking to an outside payment system, even a web redirection.

Is this the case for native iOS? I would love to forego the Apple toolchain and release obstacles and use stripe apis. But to suggest that a web solution is on par with a native app isn’t really a sound argument

It’s not on par in the slightest! Because Apple has spent (billions?) making their Native SDK, and it shows.

But they do charge 30% for the privilege of using it to make commercial software.

Yeah no. Commercial SDKs and toolchains existed before iOS; heck the OS itself is just a fork of Mac OS. There is no financial reason, other than massive profits, to charge 30% on every transaction.

Those commercial SDKs to sell Symbian, J2ME and Windows CE apps in the mobile operators' stores were way higher than 30%.

I developed Symbian and Windows CE apps and we distributed those bad boys the old fashioned way.