What if in order to sell you an iphone as a non mac user your browser vendor required Apple to give them 30% of the purchase price? What if they refused to render pages that tried to work around this?
What id your ISP required transactions being conducted via their networks to cut them in on the deal? Hell why not your computers OEM?
As a developer I agree that we shouldn't be forced and restricted to payment methods. My developer opinion is that these payment systems should be considered public utility and should be unified and should work the same for everyone - including Apple. Apple should not be able to have competing products by where they don't pay someone the cut that we pay.
I also think that payments methods shouldn't be able to restrict who we pay. Be it Wikilieaks or whoever we please. That's actually why I am not amused by framing this pity fight over the commission rates as "fight for freedom". It's not fight for freedom, it is cocky businessmen looking to increase their margins.
You know how 99% of the startups fail? Well, maybe they fail because they forget about the user.
The ideal solution for me is, Apple Pay being an open protocol and I can add payment methods to Apple Pay, can track all payments from a single UI. Then I would be O.K. with being offered %30 discount if I pay with "Epic Card" payment method(form the same payment UI).
More importantly, It's a well know that people in the game industry are overworked and underpaid and it's not because of the Apple's cut. I don't know about the situation in Epic, but if it happens that Apple lowers the rates most certainly the difference will go to C level executives(that are not underpaid already).
If Apple gets the money, they at least will pay a decent salary to their people. The game makers can consider cutting bonuses if the money is tight.
This is correct but the definition of the "user" here is different from the definition of "user" for Apple.
In the case of Google, the advertisers and the developers are the "users", and the people who are using the software are the products.
On the Apple side of things, the people who buy the phone or the laptop are the "users" and this is the folks that Apple cares about deeply(And ironically, they also suffer in the last saga by not being able to access their favourite game). That is why its always the developers complaining about Apple.
Yes, as a developer I think %30 is high and I wish it was lower but it is on par with Google. As a user, I despise the idea of giving credit card info on every app and service I would like to use. Looking at the behaviour of the companies who think they can force users what they want, I am sure that they are not going to be as nice as Apple on the payments. They will implement dark patterns.
As a user, I don't want to see another payment method, I want this to go away. As a developer I want this to go away by Apple lowering it's fees.