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10 years from now people will think it was crazy that you couldn't publish a totally legit app just because you had a payment button on the app. It would be one thing for APPL to charge a low fee for listing an app to cover their costs of hosting and review, but this is 100% about squeezing everyone, because they can

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hosting & review are just the beginning. They also maintain substantial support around the App Store. So their costs will scale with number of downloads, usage, purchases, etc, which is why their fee scales with it too.

The paid apps also subsidize the support and distribution of free apps. This makes the App Store and platform more attractive and helps developers in the end OTOH, it is pretty wild that Facebook has never paid a dime to Apple for software distribution, aside from $99 a year.

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