Everything is a choice. If a mugger has a knife on you, you can choose to let them stab you instead of giving them your money, but we still say they forced you to give them your money.
Because the choice has to be a reasonable alternative. Which in this context is an alternate provider of the product or service that reasonably allows you to reach the same set of your customers.
There's no point making bad analogies. Thinking mobile developers have the choice of "being stabbed or robbed" is not going to help us understand this economic situation better. Those instincts will definitely result in bad conclusions.
> an alternate provider of the product or service that reasonably allows you to reach the same set of your customers
If you target one company's customers, you can't complain about a lack of competition. If I only service BMWs, I need to do whatever certifications BMW say I need to do, and get a diagnostic tool that talks to BMWs. If I service cars in general, I don't. But then I won't make as big a profit from an easier to target set of potential customers.
The point is that "you have a choice" doesn't mean anything when the choice is between something you don't want and some impractical alternative which is even less of a solution than the thing you don't want.
> If you target one company's customers, you can't complain about a lack of competition.
But you're not -- you're doing the opposite. You want to sell your app to everyone no matter what platform they use. Which doesn't allow you to choose between Apple and Google or use them as leverage to get a better deal from the other, because you need both.
> If I only service BMWs, I need to do whatever certifications BMW say I need to do, and get a diagnostic tool that talks to BMWs.
If you want to make and sell brake pads for BMWs, you can just do it. You don't need BMW's permission, and shouldn't, and if they try to stop you, you have the right to complain about it.
> If I service cars in general, I don't.
How are you supposed to do that? If BMW is allowed to get away with it then so will Volkswagen and no matter what kind of car you want to work on, you're still getting held up by whoever made it.
This is why Right to Repair is a thing, and it's weird that your analogy to something you think should happen is a thing widely regarded as deserving of scorn and opposition.
By doing the tasks that don't require as much specialism, across more vendors. You can target who you like on a spectrum of niche but expensive jobs to mass-market but cheaper jobs. I would only object to people choosing niche but expensive, and then complaining about the niche.
> This is why Right to Repair is a thing, and it's weird that your analogy to something you think should happen is a thing widely regarded as deserving of scorn and opposition
Scornful people have always existed, but that doesn't mean they should be especially listened to. We aren't talking about right to repair. Anyone can repair a BMW, but they need more training and tools to do the harder jobs.
> By doing the tasks that don't require as much specialism, across more vendors.
At which point your analogy breaks down, because nobody was objecting to that. If you need to buy metric wrenches for iOS and imperial wrenches for Android, but you could buy either of them from whoever you want, nobody is paying a monopoly rent for wrenches. Or to drop the analogy, you have to write your app for two different system APIs if you want system-specific behavior, but c'est la vie.
The issue comes when someone both wants to charge for access to something like that and preclude anyone else from creating an alternative, which is the analogous thing to what creates the need for right to repair. It's not just that you need to learn how a BWM differs from a Ford or a Toyota, it's that they encrypt or otherwise purposely obfuscate the bus and then purposely charge a fee designed to drive independent mechanics out of the market and force customers into the dealership, or don't sell the tools necessary to do it at all.
If Apple was charging 30% but there were viable alternative means to install iOS apps without paying that, nobody would be objecting to it because they would just use the alternative means. But they do that and preclude alternatives, which is the problem.
Because the choice has to be a reasonable alternative. Which in this context is an alternate provider of the product or service that reasonably allows you to reach the same set of your customers.