> Apple pretty much is the government when it comes to the App Store.

It definitely is not. The defining feature of a government is the legitimate use of violence. No actual or threatened violence, no government.

There are lots of reasons to be concerned about the App Store and Apple, but let's not blur the lines between money voluntarily given to use a service, and money given to avoid arrest and jail.

To be pedantic, a government can be a collective noun for governing and ruling bodies, state-affiliated or not. And Apple, the iPhone team, the iOS team, and the App Store team are certainly governing how developers can act.

A tax is a compulsory payment levied by the government on individuals or companies to meet the expenditure which is required for public welfare.

Violence being monopolised by State is the modern political philosophy given by Weber in 1919. Tax existed when individuals namely aristocracy even had legitimate use of violence.

Apple makes case it charges fees for public good by curating list and providing security to end users, that's public welfare unless it's millions of users aren't enough to be categorised as Public.

Well in this Apple governed App store 'State' the act of violence is the forced removal of an app (a shop) from being allowed to operate, and in some case (Epic Games), completely banning the citizen from the State, let's call that Jail since Apple again may set them free, again, at their discretion.

This App Store ecosystem sits at over 1.5 billion inhabitants, larger than China.

Frankly, state tax is the perfect word to use.

You can opt out of Apple ecosystem simply by changing your phone.

You can't not opt out of your government ecosystem (Or at least, it's more complicated).

This is like calling Walmart profit margin "tax" ... just buy in another store.

> You can opt out of Apple ecosystem simply by changing your phone

The issue isn’t the end users, it’s the app owners. A single entity controls access to the large majority of paying customers (after all, Apple makes most of the profit compared to Google/Android),

I know some people that recently bought new $1000 iPhone without knowing about the 30% fee. They can't "simply change their phone" because they'd lose boat loads of money. I get sunk costs, but they feel mislead, and I don't blame them. Apple has worked very hard to lock in users, it's not very easy to just switch phones.

Not just the cost of the device, but also the cost of any applications that they've purchased. And there's the trouble of trying to get social circles to move away from FaceTime and Apple Messages. I also can't imagine that migrating data off of Apple's services to other comparable services is easy.

Yep, I don't feel like I can switch because some of my friends refuse to do normal calls, only using facetime/facetime audio. Plus the imessage data is much faster than texts. Trying to get my circle to switch to whatsapp, but until then I'm pretty stuck.

> You can't not opt out of your government ecosystem

Of course you can. If you can move from Apple to Android you can move from one country to another. It would hard to find a more perfect analogy to this situation.

It’s a fee, or a charge. It’s not a tax by the definition of the word.

Why not call it a fine? Or a bonus?

A tax is a compulsory payment levied by the government on individuals or companies to meet the expenditure which is required for public welfare.

So, it is a tax.