Yup, this is what Apple is afraid of as well, and why they are fighting it so hard with very similar arguments.
I think of Apple kind of like Nintendo, but for computers.
If you’re talking about standard rates, 30% is standard in most online stores like Steam, Google Play, PSN etc… None of them purport that the 30% is solely for payment processing.
So no: apple’s fees are competitive. Actually the 15% tier is below-market - and larger players can negotiate better rates.
Out of all the complaints you can level against apple - non-competitive transaction fees aren’t one of them, 30% is the going rate for that.
The problem is the fact that it's hard to switch for many people who are not on the technical side of life. They really are locked into an environment. This is why it's so important to broaden this environment. Give people choices outside.
Changing platforms is inherently difficult and requires a lot of education and discovering new solutions to old problems, regardless of the platform. Every platform has lock-in for non-technical users when it comes to this.
The difference is what it's about here. On Android, you have a huge variety of alternatives. You don't have them at Apple. It's even worse: they are making it hard for you to chose alternatives. Often it doesn't even make sense, since software and hardware are made just for each other.
The lock-in factor is much smaller on Android.
PS. I was that guy. Had to switch to Apple at work. It was a pain. Not only for me, which is why they switched back after the person who decided it got fired (for different reasons). We've lost a lot of money that year.
Then hopefully you understand why people get more upset over Apple's arbitrary "ecosystem" decisions than they are with Nintendo. I love Nintendo, even for all the mistakes they make. But they sell a toy; a games console that is strictly used for entertainment with no auxiliary purpose. Nobody is suing Nintendo because their PDF won't open on their Switch; Nintendo just doesn't offer that functionality, from anyone. There is no unfair market segmentation because Nintendo doesn't segregate functionality by-developer.
> What market is Apple dominating?
Have you not been following the DMA? It's software; they refuse to offer any form of competitive software distribution. Because of Apple's first-party advantage, they can explicitly block competitors from ever shipping a viable business, and until recently they even blatantly forbid the distribution of GPL-licensed apps. If Apple wants to play the Nintendo defense, then they can get both barrels that Microsoft dodged. I really have no patience for grown-up developers that want to rely on the benefit of the doubt we give a toy company.
What does that mean ‘shipping a viable business’?
1) Apple doesn't give you the same APIs they use to integrate iCloud. Your service literally cannot compete with their service on a functional basis.
2) You cannot out-price Apple without a sweetheart deal from Apple themselves. This creates a situation where Apple's consent is required to offer pricing that would be disruptive to any of their services.
3) The de-facto integration, promotion and nagging that iCloud enjoys constitutes product bundling. As we know from their deal with Google, Apple prices their defaults at a ludicrous amount, in order to create a disproportionate first-party advantage relative to competitors. User control is put up for auction under the guise of security and simplicity, when it's really being divided among sinister benefactors.
With these combined, it is effectively impossible to present a competitive first-party software experience on Apple platforms. It wouldn't matter if your service was genuinely superior to Apple's offerings because, much like Microsoft, Apple enjoys a privileged position where they can block competitors from their internal market if they pose a legitimate threat.
It's not like this is the early days of iPhone--the solution waiting for a problem. You needed competent developers to make quality products to engage and retain users. You offered lucrative deals as compensation.
You envision total disruption?
I forsee it. Microsoft took three steps down that same path and was lucky to walk away in one piece. If Apple drills-down on this point then they will be destroyed municipally without a second thought. The only country sitting on their hands and refusing to fix things is the United States, Apple's designated tax-collector.
Harder to justfy Apple's dominance when Android and Windows exist and have massive marketshare.
This can be a problem. For one, independent of Microsoft and Android's inter-competition, Apple's customers are now entirely isolated to whatever Apple curates. This is a captive market; one that Apple ensures operates inside the confines of their restrictive definitions. That has long-term effects on that market, some positive but many expressly negative. Once combined with Apple's aspirations with the MFi program, the Lightning connector "incident" in Europe, the Epic Games tempur-tantrum and their overall product strategy, it becomes blatantly clear that Apple wants to trade innovation for control. They don't want you to make the iPhone better, they want you to make them money. That's it.
Chrome is today’s Internet Explorer both in terms of market share, and use of non standard features to push a companies dominance.
Safari is today’s Internet explorer in terms of being bundled with systems as a requirement.
Ultimately, these analogies trivialize the actual state of the browser ecosystem in the 90s and early 2000s, because the computing landscape was so different.
It’s always been about server and infrastructure access. But beyond that, the Prism leaks mostly applied to telecoms.
A lot of conspiracy minded folks failed to see the forest for the trees because they failed to grok the entire infrastructure between the device in their homes and the greater world.
It’s much easier to think the device in your hand is betraying oneself than to think about the immense number of other components like telecoms, servers, MitM etc that comprise modern communication.
But those are parlor tricks. Yes, the United States forces Apple and Microsoft to turn over data on a regular basis; everyone from India to Brazil demands the same thing. It's non-unique. The United States and it's FIVE-EYES partners clearly have more capabilities on the table; they literally control these businesses, up to a certain point. If you're unwilling to acquit telecoms and server providers for installing backdoors, then it's a no-brainer to implicate Microsoft, Google and Apple for knowledgeably shipping compromised client software too.
Even though other options exist “technically”, users on the two (3?) popular mobile and desktop OS experience a great deal of platform friction when opting to make their own choice (if at all possible like on iOS).
Which, imho isn’t any more optimal than WebKit or Blink.
Granted, perhaps if the duopoly didn’t exist, it could get more resources. After all they did once dethrone IE6, but I think that was as much Microsoft’s blunder as it was Mozilla’s success. I’m not sure Apple or Google are making the same blunders today.
We've crystalized around a specific role for each browser (e.g. Chromium brings in whatever webstandards it needs to pretend to be an OS, Safari tries to keep up while also sneaking Apple ecosystem facilities, Firefox... keeping up?) and there is no real innovation. Of course, we have better ways to not-block-ads, scrape user telemetry, or ai-whatever-that's-good-for... but nothing substantial towards improvements for the people using browsers.
The browser space is stagnating.
I'm sure it's wrong to "hold the web back", but I'm also afraid of when Google finally takes over the internet. Because those "don't be evil"-days are in the past.
Food for thought:
Have you ever considered that the demand for this functionality in the browser only exists because it is forbidden natively? I've got no use for cross-platform 3D APIs, game streaming functionality or even WebRTC in my browser when it comes down to it; but it makes plain sense that people want to push this functionality to the browser because Apple resists it natively. That's just supply/demand at work.
I’m talking specifically about having access to the bluetooth stack, having access to the device’s vibrations, etc.
Chrome's reckless and indifferent approach of including every API under the sun is being used by advertisers today to track users through comprehensive browser fingerprinting.