Actually many people do just fine without Apple.
However if many players decide to get out from Apple ecosystem, it'll be Apple that'll change stance here.
Since you’re talking about web, if you want to be on Shopify’s or Salesforce’s marketplace, you need to share revenue too.
Before iPhone, operating systems and the web were wide open for computation. You could install everything you wanted.
Apple views the iPhone as a sovereign territory, not just some generic compute resource. They can delete accounts, block access to the CPU, and charge whatever taxes they want. It's their land. In their minds, you're blessed to have the opportunity to be on their platform. Your users are strictly on loan from Apple, and you're going to pay for access to their customers. Your app better behave.
The market evolved into the shape that it did because Apple had a great product, a fun evolution of iPod, and a simple and compelling UI. Microsoft missed the shot, Android took time to get its act together.
None of this was a bad deal for developers at the time, but now there's no way to avoid it. We're now living in a sort of North Korea. Entrenched, with no way out. Over half of your potential customers don't have other devices and you can't reach them any other way than going through Apple.
It sucks for small companies in tech having to carve out ever smaller pieces of the pie. Year by year the market shrinks because the giants take it, tax it, and ration it out. If we'd have known then what we know now, we would have bought up every first generation iPhone and buried them all in a ditch.
iPhone is compute, but they'll be damned if you do anything that threatens their dear platform and profits.
We should push for our legislators to require open installs without an App Store. Customers already pay for the device. They shouldn't have to pay additional taxes for us trying to develop for them, trying to survive in this already hostile market.
That wasn’t always true of phones (pre-iPhone smartphones), PDAs, games consoles, workstations, or some mainframes. Platform owners requiring license fees for on developers on their platform, using their dev tools, was not invented by Apple.
That makes it unlike either a one-time or a flat maintenance fee.
Imagine a web developer gets hired to build a landing page for a product. Yes please, charge twice as much for your work, sure. But say they tried to charge an ongoing 30% of all future revenue for that product. Do you think HN would be behind that?