Google certainly aren't doing nothing - 30% includes hosting, bandwidth, patching, some amount of marketing, payments, fraud. Whether it's worth 30% is a different discussion, but to say they provide no value is just sily.
30% is ridiculous for Apple and Google. It's an arbitrary number that they could get away with when the Appstore came out nine years ago and everyone ran with it ever since.
I don't know what a fair amount is. But I doubt it's in the two digits.
When Apple announced 30% cut, mobile devs where cheering, because many providers were charging way above 50%.
Well, I guess Symbian got N-Gage and the Ovi Store towards the end, but they never tried to lock it down against third party sources.
You just have one large customer in one country instead of thousands/millions in many different jurisdictions each with its own tax and consumer protection laws. That's worth more than 2.5% but it's not worth 30%.
I would say fair is somewhere between 5% and 10%, considering they also provide some distribution infrastructure on top of payments, billing, taxes and compliance.
Developing The Android platform is a benefit for Google, not for the app makers.
<1% ?
If Google came up with a magical technique to get rid of all malware on their app store that didn't cost them a dime, you could still argue that they're adding value to justify the 30% cut.
If Google spends a billion dollars to get rid of all the malware on their app store, and it doesn't work, and using the app store is not significantly less dangerous than sideloading apps, then they're not adding any value to justify the 30% cut.
Note that I don't think Google's efforts are completely fruitless. At the very least, they seem to help with taking down duplicate apps, and that's something. But whether or not moderation is valuable only depends on whether they succeed or not -- their effort is irrelevant.
With nobody to filter out impersonators and repackaging of an app with added malware ?
Google will probably approve anything that's not an obvious malware but not much more than that
For example Chinese hackers added hidden code to 34 legit apps totaling 500 millions downloads and Apple didn't notice a thing.
https://www.macrumors.com/2015/09/20/xcodeghost-chinese-malw...
Happy now?