> Where's Instacart without a high-quality barcode scanner^W^Wcamera in the pocket of every shopper?

Fairly certain that I, the iPhone owner, paid for that in full. Plus a healthy margin.

I guess but that's not really how services like that work. And iOS is 100% a service with customer owned hardware. The real cost of your iPhone is paid by every publisher that wants to sell you stuff on your phone.

Amazon operates this way, DoorDash operates this way. You aren't paying the cost of your deliveries, sure you get charged a fee but the bulk is paid by the seller forking over 30% of their revenue for the privilege of selling to you.

Just because you're paying doesn't mean you aren't the product.

Your argument is essentially the same as for patents... "I invented this tech, everyone can use it to create whole new things, I deserve a cut for my investment."

But Apple didn't invent GPS, it didn't invent the barcode scanner. Apple sells a hardware with a ridiculous profit margin. Devices that only have value through the software that is written for them, Uber is not selling a device with a GPS, they are selling a taxi service (for better or worse), and they will use whatever is available on the device to make that work well.

Developers for 10+ years abandoned Symbian, BlackBerry, webOS, Windows Phone and everything else and instead focused on better hardware, software and developer APIs (iOS and Android) and led other companies to die because either their hardware wasn’t good enough or consumers were abandoning them because they couldn’t download their favorite apps.

So maybe Apple did something “right” to deserve millions of developers and billion+ consumers to chose them instead of others?

It’s awesome to be in 2022 and act like “Apple doesn’t deserve anything”. Look at last 15 years of mobile history and what Apple has done to this industry.

Apple did do something right a long time ago... but it doesn't mean they get an indefinite 30% cut of the entire world.

I don't have a stake in this, I don't own an iPhone or Android phone, or any smart phone and never have... I just see a rent seeker abusing their position as much as possible.

> Developers for 10+ years abandoned Symbian, BlackBerry, webOS, Windows Phone and everything else and instead focused on better hardware, software and developer APIs [...]

Note that we are discussing a huge markup on a material service, not merely software.

You know something else that enabled that? The internet. And mobile connectivity. So 30 % to each of these as well would be more than fair, right?