I can't help but read most of this as corporate double-speak. In my mind there is no principle (other than greed) that justifies grabbing 30% of all sales on a digital store. Its especially greedy to grab money from future sales via subscriptions for apps like Spotify. And they also ban Spotify from telling their users to go to Spotify.com and pay there. I'm hoping Epic succeeds in pushing Apple and Steam to a less exploitative revenue split.
They advertise the App Store as a feature of the phone they're selling, and get paid for the feature by customers who buy the phone for the advertised features. But then they also grab 30% of sales from the developers who ship on their platform. Feels like double-dipping.
A reasonable option would be to charge fixed fee that allows them to pay for their review team and other overhead. They can tier this so that complex apps have to pay more for the effort involved in reviewing their app. And then charge a fixed cost per download that covers the payment processing, hosting and delivery costs - which would be a tiny percentage.
They advertise the App Store as a feature of the phone they're selling, and get paid for the feature by customers who buy the phone for the advertised features. But then they also grab 30% of sales from the developers who ship on their platform. Feels like double-dipping.
A reasonable option would be to charge fixed fee that allows them to pay for their review team and other overhead. They can tier this so that complex apps have to pay more for the effort involved in reviewing their app. And then charge a fixed cost per download that covers the payment processing, hosting and delivery costs - which would be a tiny percentage.