Apple is basically a local tax authority now. For the... Apple tax, y'know?

As a user, a huge part of their value proposition is that they act as a private regulator, to good effect.

It's the libertarian dream of paying companies to be your private regulatory enforcement agency (see Friedman and others).

Then they tax companies for access to their little haven of sanity.

I'd prefer the government just regulate out all the plainly-bad behavior that goes on in the software industry, but lacking that... I prefer to retain this option.

I wish their cut were lower but that they levy a "tax" makes a certain amount of sense, given the circumstances.

s/local/global

Except you can always opt to not use, develop for or deploy onto Apple devices. Just use Android if you’re uncomfortable.

Do you think that your approach to life would have made a better world than it is now? If we said like "Don't worry about companies throwing shit into the rivers, just buy bottled water", or "Don't worry about workers rights just find a better job", "Don't worry about purchases, just buy from a different company", like we need to make sure that the system can thrive, that small businesses can develop without being blood sucked, we are all at stake of making sure that the system as a whole can grow and not only the fruit company and its stakeholder, so no we don't have a choice of ignoring fruity shit, we need to make sure that what they can do is regulated to let every one work and fairly earn, I am fairly annoyed by this libertarian brain damage trying to make everyone reading more stupid, you want to let apple get away, then do that use apple and set up a direct debit so that they can keep exploiting you, for the rest of us with opposable thumb, we're going to try to make sure that regulators regulate

And if I'm uncomfortable with Android, what should I use ? I have the choice between being abused by Apple, Google or having no apps because no one bothers developping apps for Linux phones.

They though about that too, they will provide an API, that the developer has to call before redirecting the user to the external payment provider. So they can approximate the amount of sales the app generates. It’s in the article.

My app has a 90% bounce rate Apple, sorry!

Fraud is a crime you can go to prison for.

Would be too bad if the developer just doesn't do that right?

Apple review your apps before approving them onto the App Store.

You can opt to not follow their rules, and they can opt to not approve your app.

Unfortunately code that did that would probably not pass the App Store review process.

Probably apps with low numbers of sales will be punished in rankings, with low numbers of sales it means your users don't really like you.

Does that mean I can buy my app into the rankings by paying more in commission?

I mean maybe I am being cynical here, but it was implied that developers could just under-report their sales without negative effects, in order to fight that possibility I might suppose that Apple would increase positioning of apps in the Netherlands that reported high sales, under theory that they were 'better'.