Except physical distribution is expensive by its nature. It involves producing and moving around physical objects — that's material and labor per copy.

App store, on the other hand, is a digital distributor. Making a digital copy is so cheap it could as well be free. And even then, not all app developers publish on the app store because they want or need its distribution services. There are many developers who would happily arrange the distribution of their apps themselves, with their own infrastructure they already have anyway, but they have to publish on the app store because that's the only way onto millions of iOS devices.

I'll say it again: it should not be legal for a hardware manufacturer to retain any kind of control over hardware after it's been sold.

This is what they're talking about when they say that productivity gains have gone only to the wealthiest. Buying an album digitally, when every single step in the production and distribution of that album have become an order of magnitude cheaper (outside of labor costs, which somehow remain flat no matter what), costs the same as it did 50 years ago.

Every part of application distribution has become cheaper, so you lock down every platform and charge the same percentage.

So what? Why does the price have to remain the same despite technological advancements that are totally capable of reducing it to almost zero? It's as if we suddenly discovered a way to produce unlimited amounts of food, for free, anywhere in the world, but food manufacturers would start raising a stink about how important it is that people would still starve.

I agree with you completely. I think Apple should, at the very least, allow side loading.

I was just answering the question about what the cut used to be in the packaged software world.