Customers can only validate it if they have a choice. How does an iPhone developer validate or invalidate Apple's behavior? They're basically a hostage on Apple's platform, and the only thing keeping them there is the fact that they get paid. Apple shouldn't have the negotiating power they wield, and regulators are taking action to stop them from abusing it.
App developers are not the "customer" of these curated store platforms any more than cereal manufacturers are the "customer" of a grocery store.
If you try to take your business elsewhere, you have no market, because no one else is able to create a store which targets the same market. This is entirely unlike a grocery store, because if Safeway is unreasonable you can launch an entire store just for your own products and people can shop at both.
However, with these curated store platforms, a user can only use the App Store. They can get a different phone--at ridiculous expense, as there are numerous anticompetitive lock-in mechanisms with respect to licenses that prevent this: I would, for example, lose access to all of the music and books and apps I've ever bought--but then they aren't able to use the App Store anymore.
The problem is that virtually all sane people only carry around a single phone. This is not true of grocery stores or frankly any other form of store unless you map the analogy to geographic regions, where people have to move to a new house in a different community--at great difficulty and expense--to get to another grocery store. Even if you only have a monopoly over one "small" region, that's still a monopoly.
This is not really the case for mass market consumer goods (like the cereal example in your post). Safeway and Kroger are a duopoly not far off of Apple’s app store monopoly and if you don’t like their terms, there aren’t exactly alternative viable channels for your cereal.
I get what you're saying, but I think the fact that convenience stores are anything but a monopoly just further illustrates how disparate Apple's authority is here. The power Apple wields is like if there was one cereal store, and if you didn't like the selection they had then you "just find another breakfast food". It doesn't, and shouldn't have to be a binary choice.
You don't have that choice if you're building a service that relies on having a mobile app. You are required to have presence on iOS if you want any semblance of success.
I'm the one who pushed the discussion onto the tangentially-related Apple mobile platform, guilty as charged.
Do you want to defend Apple's absolute control over the iPhone in front of God, Saurik and everyone, or admit that the world's richest company operates out of greed sometimes?
Greed? No. Profit motivated. Of course. They are a business. Businesses generally exist to make a profit. The more profit they make, the stronger and more resilient they become. Apple, having been very close to bankruptcy a couple of times means that they have a strong motivation to make a profit. Nothing is without reason, whether or not you like the reason. I guess corporate greed is a thing, but then so are the very real costs of operating services. Ranting about a business being successful or being the wealthiest just smacks of petty anti-capitalist jealousy. I get it, Apple were supposed to fail and they didn’t.
Are Apple’s fees worth 15%[1] of the vendors revenue? Possibly not, though as a provider, they are entitled to make a profit.
[1] Yes, yes; 30% if the vendor make > $1,000,000. Let get real, the significant majority of the app that you are arguing about are likely to be grossing less than that. And of course 15% of $0 is $0, so the argument is completely moot for freely distributed apps.
> Possibly not, though as a provider, they are entitled to make a profit.
The big thing people seem to disagree with is Apple forcing themselves to be a provider (and thereby forcing their entitlement to a profit). Apple is certainly entitled to compensation when people use their service, but no computer should force it's services on the user. Regulators seem to really hate that bit, and it will be interesting to see how Apple responds to the Digital Markets act.
