The 30% commission has a long history. There are precedents going back to the early days of games consoles. Both the iTunes music store and Steam opened in 2003 charging 30% or very close to it (iTunes tracks were 99c so it doesn’t work out exactly).

It’s hard to argue the 30% in either of those cases were a matter of abuse of market power. Steam was struggling to establish itself against the incumbent distribution channels. The iTunes rates were negotiated with the major labels who were notoriously hard deal makers and very wary of online sales channels. They held all the cards is their negotiations with Apple and yet they seemed to think 30% was fair. So at that point I don’t think it’s possible to make a credible case that the 30% rate was extortionate.

If 30% was abusive, we’d expect to see it act as a brake on adoption of the App Store by developers, but is there really any evidence for that? On Android have any of the smaller stores tried to differentiate on price at lower than 30% to attract developers, or has Google tried to woo iOS developers with lower rates? If 30% was abusively high we’d expect to see something like that happening.

So the fact that these competitors use the same pricing model and the same price has a bad smell.

This would be like supermarkets charging product manufacturers a uniform fixed rental for shelf space. No supermarket would stock toilet paper, it’s too bulky and low revenue, or if they did they have to charge a lot more for it.

Or is it more that "Apple stuff" is not directly substitutable with "Google stuff", and that Apple has a monopoly on "Apple stuff"?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/975776/revenue-split-lea...

Pretty much everyone has, with the occasional exception.

I wonder how much of this is deliberate collusion, as opposed to an equilibrium where companies all realize that it's more profitable to match each others' fees than to try to compete on price.

If other app stores charge 30%, you know that developers are willing to pay 30%, and there's not much to be gained by reducing your own rate below that.

I saw a theory in the comments on HN once that companies can 'collude' without communicating with each other. If memory serves, it was different than just achieving an equilibrium. Maybe it's enough of a theory to have a name? Hopefully someone who knows what I'm thinking of can chime in.

Edit: I may be thinking of "tacit collusion". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion - "Tacit collusion is a collusion between competitors, which do not explicitly exchange information and achieving an agreement about coordination of conduct."

Just because bosses didnt sit down a and sign a deal in a smokey room doesnt mean no decision was made