I don't know if you're trolling or not... but are you seriously unaware of the value they're providing? Is this some kind of mystery to many people?

In the PC/Linux space -- where traditionally no online marketplace existed with wide reach -- if you want to sell your software you have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps:

1. Create a website.

2. Market your software. Nobody will see it. Spend more money on more marketing, and then maybe -- just maybe -- you might reach 1-10% of your potential market.

3. Sign up with a credit card payment processor. Find out that people will navigate all the way to your store page, see the CC entry form, and click cancel. A lot of people. Like... 50%.

4. Discover that you're treated like the dirt stuck to the bottom of the payment processor's shoes, and they charge a lot of overhead too. Especially for small transcations. You have no hope, ever, of selling 1 million copies of your small app for $1 and make anywhere near a million dollars.

5. Get hacked because you can't afford a full security team to babysit your online store 24/7.

6. Discover that you're on the second page of Google's search results for your exact product name because of competitor's SEO.

7. And so on. And on, and on...

Apple's 30% cut is cheap. It's notably less than doing it yourself at a small scale, under one million dollars or so.

They instantly provide you with hundreds of millions of potential customers, free marketing and exposure, frictionless payment processing that goes down to the single-dollar range efficiently, secure systems for all of that, and more.

Everybody in the mobile app industry knows that while there are more Android devices out there, the profit is in the Apple ecosystem.

An ecosystem Apple created at enormous expense.

An ecosystem that has devices that are mostly kept up-to-date (by Apple! For 6+ years! At huge expense!), massively reducing development and test effort. Notably, unlike the Android platform which is a shit-show of bargain basement garbage with either zero vendor support, or next to zero.

An ecosystem where customers feel safe because of the security guarantees provided by Apple! Confident customers spend more. A lot more. The Android marketplace is like 30% malware at this point, for comparison. Customers don't feel safe spending their money there. I know I don't.

I could go on like this for pages and pages, but I hope you get the point.

You're getting the end-result of the main product of the world's biggest company. If you think this is worthless, literally without value, then you're probably one of those people that also think that they could reproduce the Uber app over a weekend...