Well, this is just one battle.

A "win" for Apple, in an individual battle, merely means that the status quo remains unchanged. They have to win every battle, to win the war.

And Apple is already losing very significant battles elsewhere.

For example, in the EU, with the soon to be in effect App Store laws, Apple is being forced to allow sideloading, and won't be able to charge the 300% fee, in the EU.

In the USA, maybe this court case fails. But there are more court cases being brought against them, and also laws being considered that could force Apple to change anyway, even if they win the current court battles.

Apple lost the battle in the linked article

Of the 10 battles in the linked article, Apple won 9, and lost one of the less important ones.

The article title focuses on the one they lost, but...

I disagree its less important. A great majority of the most popular apps in the app store (not counting games) are SAAS businesses, they will benefit enormously by redirecting sign ups to their own websites. I think this will have a pretty big overall affect for developers on iOS if they can maintain good conversions this way.

One area not discussed often enough with the App Store for subscription apps is the percentage of people that have a billing issue and end up churning because of it. This can be anywhere from 8-20% depending on your app. Because purchases are anonymous on the App Store, you have little ability as an app owner to ping your customer and say "Hey, your credit card failed, click here to update it".

Supposedly Apple will be making some moves to rectify this in iOS17 but handling subscriptions yourself makes this pretty easy...

how much do you think is fair? the platform, APIs, and developer liasing are not free. what “tax” is fair so that apple can build the platform that enables developers to make money?

You should be able to install any software you like on devices you paid full price for. Apple should make their money selling phones, computers, tablets, an operating system which should run on every PC, and digital content like music and books.

Do you feel the same way about consoles?

No GP but yes, absolutely.

Yes of course.

Microsoft did quite well for decades with Windows, never once charging developers to distribute on the platform. Apple does quite well with macOS. The value proposition of the App Store is access, period.

Instead, Microsoft charged thousands of dollars per seat per development tool, and even more for access to documentation (I have an old set of MSDN CDs around somewhere).

It’s two sides of the same coin, and I think the idea of taking a percentage of revenue does a better job of aligning platform owners and developers.

Indeed.

In the Microsoft model, small developers, who couldn't pay the thousands of dollars for development cost and figure out their own distribution lost.

In the App Store model, everything is free (or very cheap, $99), till you make revenue.

This is just not true. It was relatively easy to obtain a copy of visual studio if you tried for relatively cheap. I know because I used their tools all through high school, college, and beyond and was actually rather poor during those times. They never tried to leech your revenue from you either in a scummy fashion later on once successful either.

Microsoft was very active in giving free licenses out for education, but those licenses often wouldn't allow for commercial use. If you've never been through a license audit, their legal team would usually make you pay through the nose or suffer through a lawsuit if they found you weren't using the right license for your dev tools.

That said, they'd generally target bigger businesses over smaller dev-only shops.

Microsoft charged $1500/seat for MSDN access...

What would be fair is for people to be able to install apps from alternative app stores, and to drive that percentage down via competition.

Some competitor app stores may charge as low as 5%, to pay for processing fees.

And others will charge different fees. And the app store that is the most competitive will get most of the business.

This is really exaggerated. 80% of all App Store revenue comes from sleazy pay to win games and loot boxes (according to the Epic trial).

The streaming apps have either completely abandoned in app purchases (Netflix, Spotify, YouTube TV, etc) or they allow outside purchases.

Not to mention apps that require out of band subscriptions to use or sell physical services and have an option of Apple Pay (standard credit card charges) like Uber.

Even if in app purchases only charged standard credit card processing fees, that’s the least of the problems for the Indy developer.