yes, i am putting all the developer on the app store on the same level, because coding into law the distinction that it's so obvious for you is not going to be easy. at what point "randomgamecompany" became so big to be promoted to "i dont need to pay for the app store anymore." Laws are not perfect, nobody should work for free.
I dont think that is a fair comparison, you took away all the issues with branding, your customer dont really care if you are hosting a website yourself or aws or anything else, probably most of them wont even know what that means.
If you want to start to sell ebooks (or anything really) you get an advantage by placing it in a well known store, you can prove me wrong but i think that is a fair statement.
So it is really hard for me to accept as fair a situation where you could build a store, build the brand reputation, host other people product and not get a compensation.
Let's say running an ebook service, that cost cost you some money, a portion of your profit will go into building this shop, that will also be used by another party, because you have millions of users and a good trusted brand. in order to sell on that market you sell a some subcription based like a web hosting.
Party B, after using your premuim service, decide he will use your service just as a frontstore, sending your customer to his own website to complete purchase.
but how is this different from, for example, me selling stuff on amazon? i want to access the amazon customer pool, so i pay amazon a fee to do it?
what would be apple alternatives that would not imply giving away services for free? i still have an hard time understanding this part: i understand that 30% cut i a lot i am not defending the 30% tax.
> If I have an ebook store and want to give iOS users a nice experience when buying books Apple will make the books more expensive with 30% and on top of that if I want to give my users information that they have the option to buy cheaper from my website I can't , Apple is preventing their users to get informed/educated on how to get cheaper stuff because this information costs Apple money.
Well i go back to my argument of isnt that like saying: "i like to use your ebook platform to sell my stuff, but i dont want to pay for it"
the fact that you switched from software to ebook does not change the fact that you want to choose to be able to sell without giving a commission to apple for the store they did set up
I am trying to understand why is this business model from apple not acceptable, from my point of view the way apple makes money on the apple store is with the 30% fees on transations. In exchange they give out tools, libraries and services for free. Do i get that wrong?
with that in mind isnt the request of Epic something like: "We want access to all your platform and tools for free?"