If Apple is so bad at this that they have to charge 30%, they should have failed in the free market to a competitor that can do the same or better for 3%. However, Apple has prevented that, not by being better or cheaper, but by implementing DRM that locks users out from having a choice (and the market as a whole ended up being a duopoly with cartel-like pricing).
Whether Apple can be cheaper isn't really the point (they should be, digital services are a very high margin business). It's that they're anti-competitive to the point that the market for paid apps and in-app payments became inefficient (in a financial sense).
You are trying to tell me that credit card processing fees are negligible, software engineers work for free, advertising doesn’t require overhead, etc…
I guess that kind of thinking that everything is basically free is why alot of startups just fail so easily.
Your profit is whatever your revenue minus costs. Plenty of app stores have operated in the red that we know this isn’t trivial to get right. It definitely is nowhere near negligible as patent asserted. I’m frustrated by how dumb HN is getting lately.
