It's clear that the App Store offers significant value for many vendors, and charging for it is fine. Epic apparently generates $500m of revenue per year from the iPhone, and they're doing so using platforms, tools, and APIs that Apple built to help developers do that. It's reasonable that Apple would get a slice of that. The company I work for makes, well, a lot less revenue that Epic, but a decent chunk of the revenue we do make goes to AWS and Stripe, as compensation for their help in letting us earn that revenue.
What's not great is the specific way Apple has chosen to get this cut. AWS and Stripe both run, more-or-less, on a cost-plus model; they package up a service, and resell it to us at a markup (in the case of AWS bandwidth, a very, very, fat markup), and they let us decide how much of that service to consume, and how we want to balance our purchases between them and competing vendors.
Apple's stance here is a little like if AWS tried to force people who use any AWS service to use their overpriced egress bandwidth for everything, and sued customers found to be using Cloudflare to reduce their costs.
Simple example is the sidebar [1]
Before it became the commonly used it is not in early OSX i twas third party libraries that would allow you do use these views. A lot of what is now macOS HIG was first made popular by third party developers (for free) then integrated into the OS X and then third party developers would migrate to the officially supported version.
To pretend Apple created all of this in a vaccum is a convenient lie people tell themselves.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Is that a good example? I think that's how it works. Egress out to cloudflare is billed at the full rate last I checked. GCP gives you a discount, but not AWS.
AWS doesn't care if you try and offload some processing to cheap Hetzner servers; Stripe doesn't care if you offer Paypal as a second option. Apple very much cares about anything you do which might reduce the amount of money routed through the app store.
I dont think it is over-dramatic. It is little exaggerated to make the point, but not over-dramatic for sure. The Smartphone impact to our society will be if not already unprecedented. We will ( unfortunately ) "live" on our Smartphone.
For those who have been looking forward to Smartphone since ( Apple ) Newton era, which is now coming close to 30 years, this has been long time coming. But now we are actually here, it is kind of scary the direction we are heading.
During the pandemic, when fitness classes shifted to virtual video sessions, Apple demanded a 30% cut because what was once an offline “delivery of the goods” became online and iPhone -facilitated. What’s so dystopian about this example is that a virtual gym session is not too different from any kind of remote work.
Under the “value is delivered over an iDevice” philosophy, Apple’s tax can take a bite from nearly any plate in the economy.
Of course, if you include the fee explicitly then people will think to look elsewhere and realize they can avoid it. But that's fine, taking a cut is stupid anyway. Really just seems like the app should be paying more to Apple (like a physical store paying rent on real estate) up front and getting the full price of their purchases anyway.