I'd probably flip the order, but to a certain extent I don't disagree.
In theory, if there's a truely competitive market (has such a thijg evwr actually existed for anything?) it shouldn't matter what a particular store charges as any other store could come in and charge a lower percentage and provide a 'better' service.
That can't happen without very open access to alternative app stores though.
In an idealized enviornment whoever could provide the best app store for the least amount of overhead and fees would be successful.
That said there's something about defaults and the many year headstart Apple has had with their own app store which makes me skeptical that even in a completely open environment that there could ever realistically be a mass alternative for everyone and expecting the average user to care about developer fees they don't understand is a hard sell.
Even if Apple manages to keep 99% of all transactions, simply having open competition will open the door to all sorts of improvements.
You could decouple distribution from payment processing. Have an "app store" with only free apps, but they can have in-app purchases if they handle their own payment processing. This is basically just a CDN. We already have a very mature and open market for CDNs, and they're very cheap.
We also already have a mature, slightly less open market for payment processors. Stripe charges about 3% and provides almost all the features the App Store provides for 10x bigger fees. The one feature most people would probably miss is centralized subscription management, but there would be nothing stopping Stripe (or someone else) from offering the exact same basic feature, charging way less than Apple, and still making a huge profit for themselves
In theory, if there's a truely competitive market (has such a thijg evwr actually existed for anything?) it shouldn't matter what a particular store charges as any other store could come in and charge a lower percentage and provide a 'better' service.
That can't happen without very open access to alternative app stores though.
In an idealized enviornment whoever could provide the best app store for the least amount of overhead and fees would be successful.
That said there's something about defaults and the many year headstart Apple has had with their own app store which makes me skeptical that even in a completely open environment that there could ever realistically be a mass alternative for everyone and expecting the average user to care about developer fees they don't understand is a hard sell.