I was about to write a comment that Apple's App Store earnings are basically pocket change for them, but I looked up the most recent numbers and they've exploded.
They claim they gave devs ~$64Bn in 2021. That means they collected about $27Bn in revenue in 2021, and most of that is basically money for free and almost entirely profit.
It's probably about 10-12% of their profit and grows without them having to do much at all.
How much time to iUsers spend within native apps compared to third party apps? I'd imagine it's mostly third party, can't imagine tons of people spend a hour a day in the call log. If it was made illegal to take any cut on the app store, they would still have to run it otherwise that new iPhone is just a telephone and a browser, who's paying $1k+ for that?
So less functionality than a first or second generation iPhone, but you want to charge a months rent for it? Who cares what sensors and tech you have if there isn't any applications to take advantage of them? It's like releasing a state of the art game console but not having any games to play on it.
And don't forget, it's a line of profit that is literally them printing money at virtually no cost to themselves vs other markets where they have to actually produce physical goods. Yes they have to run the CDN behind the app store and do their crappy little moderation of things, but that's a few cents on every dollar.
They claim they gave devs ~$64Bn in 2021. That means they collected about $27Bn in revenue in 2021, and most of that is basically money for free and almost entirely profit.
It's probably about 10-12% of their profit and grows without them having to do much at all.