Seriously - look at the coalition Epic put together for their trial. Almost everyone on there has some sort of abusive billing process / history.
I'm a former Mac dev--I think Apple likes to use this argument to justify a lot of their choices, but in reality their design decisions often make life difficult for developers in ways that aren't beneficial to the customers.
My former company produced screen recording software, and since I started in 2018 to when I left at the end of 2020 each MacOS release required us to spend a good 3 months fixing our apps to run under the new OSes. Notarization required us to change how we signed our libraries and integrated them across the 3 applications we produced; the permissions paradigm for mic and webcam was beautiful, and easy to develop around, but when they added screen recording permissions it was truly awful, and they broke their own patterns. APIs would be deprecated with no replacement, documentation was sparse at best, with header files often being more useful than the examples provided on developer.apple.com....
My point being, we often spent more time bending our app to Apple's will than fixing bugs or adding much-requested features. Apple's argument was that these changes they forced us to make was net-beneficial for end users: less malware with notarization, better privacy controls with permissions--but when it really came down to it, they just want more control over distribution of apps and "special treatment" for their own tooling.
Apple is the literal definition of "insane dark patterns" if you happen to be a developer.
Made a profitable app on the app store? Oh look! Apple used your market data to clone it, shoved their product to the top of the "marketplace" they happen to own, and now you have no business.
Want to improve your user experience by shipping a compliant browser rendering engine? Oh... we're so sorry, only Apple can "safely" let the user view the web, using safari, where they hoover up more data.
Want to debug on a variety of hardware/software combinations to better support users? Oh... sadly the licensing agreement forbids virtualization - Go spend 10k on physical devices.
Basically - Apple is a shit company that happens to have interests that are currently aligned with customer value (in some places). They will not remain that company.
Benevolent dictatorships are by far the best form of government you can get - as long as you're in the in group. The problem is you never stay there forever: Either you will change, or the company will change. See the turmoil happening now around Google products. See the backlash MS got in the 90/2000s.
BUT when developers complain about apple "hoovering" up data I laugh. I mean, is this a joke? App developers are at the forefont of privacy protection? When I'm on my PC browsing the web and that game site wants to install that browser toolbar they are looking out for me?
The problem is - as I said, developers have almost no credibility anymore.
Seriously loot boxes, pay to win etc etc.
Apple has realized that doing something quasi right by their users means they can charge big premiums and a lot more. So they are going to rake in the cash on that basis - fantastic.
I am the creative cutting edge!
Silly, silly, me
I personally think it’s a bad direction to go in, especially with the outsized power Apple has over the industry, but they have clearly found willing audiences for it.