Maybe not surprising but if you read the comments on the website there seems to be only Apple fanboys commenting who are butt-hurt about it. You can not make this up, consumers who root for a monopoly. This reminds me of gamers who hate the Epic Games Store with passion even though they give the actual devs of the games a bigger cut. Competition is always good for the consumers. And I get the security part when it co…
What monopoly? Android has a larger market share than Apple by quite a large factor in the European Union. Saying that Apple does not provide value is laughable - saying that it isn't worth 30% of the transaction value might be one thing, but they provide the R&D to create the device, the platform, the review infrastructure, update infrastructure, development environment, etc. I'm not even sure I disagree with you, b…
By that same measure I should be allowed to ask how this R&D benefits the majority of app developers on the app store. Honestly, when it comes to the value Apple provides to their developers, a much stronger argument would be their marketing that leads to extraordinary customer loyalty, in addition to the higher value market in terms of what customers they attract.
But R&D? Honestly you're joking right? The majority of the platforms "cool" features are locked down and not available to developers. Can I make use of the iPhones SOS feature for my emergency service? Nope, this is an Apple exclusive service, only offered by and through them themselves.
What about NFC/digital payments? Yeah no. Can't access that as an developer without a heavily restricted API.
What about their industry leading Bluetooth stack? Nope, also locked down. I can only pair certain devices, hell I can't even enable platform interoperability between Android and iOS, even though we _know this works_ due to the covid contact tracing feature.
Good luck with trying to offer a competing product to the Apple Watch on their platform. You can't.
Development infrastructure? You mean the infrastructure that I can also only procure through them? The infrastructure that consists of a Mac that I need to actually publish iOS apps, even though nothing would be stopping me from developing these apps on another platform, say Linux?
What about CI/CD and testing and security research? Remember, up until 1-2 years ago, Apple actively went to court against offers such as those of corellium, like when you wanted a virtual device to test your app with.
Google had all this and more on a free app store with a much more fractured ecosystem.
I could go on and on about this, but the majority of app store developers doesn't make use of a large part of their "R&D". A large part of what you call "R&D" I call the typical Apple BS of claiming well established technologies and practices as their own invention and then somehow finding a way to charge you for it.
I'd accept this argument in smaller markets what with the VR goggles and whatnot, and I agree that from a design standpoint, all of these API's / lockdowns are well intentioned and make sense.
But at the same time, the antitrust violation standpoint holds for me as well. Even if I tried, I could not offer a competing product to say, the Apple Watch, because Apple will not allow me to create a device with the same interoperability like their own devices.