Apple Platform Expenses: Billions
Spotify Platform Expenses: 15-30% of Revenue of memberships initiated through the iOS app
Why is this unfair?
You keep comparing the expenses of a single app / service (Spotify) to the costs of the whole iOS platform. I don't see the point of this, other than to make Apple look good. It would be more relevant to compare the
total expenses of iOS to the
total revenue brought in via apps / subscriptions - which is likely orders of magnitude higher. It's not like Apple has to create a new App Store for each app - the costs are clearly spread over the marketplace as a whole.
None of that's a thing. There is no need for costs to justify pricing.
Yet you have repeatedly justified Apple's developer tax in terms of how much it costs to run their platform. No one is saying Apple doesn't deserve to earn money - or even a lot of money. It's a question of how much is fair.
Ultimately, the argument boils down to whether one believes the market
alone is able to determine a fair tax for selling apps / services on Apple's iOS platform. It's primarily a concern for developers and services, not consumers.
Apple's products are highly desirable to consumers, especially those with greater disposable income, so the App Store is likewise very desirable to sell into - by revenue, it has 2/3 of mobile app sales and 3/4 of mobile subscriptions. This means Apple can charge developers high commissions, with the only limit being that if they squeeze too hard, developers would gradually leave the platform. And if consumers could no longer get their favourite apps / services, iPhone sales would fall.
Some would say that because Apple has created a high quality product, which (rich) consumers overwhelmingly prefer, they deserve to milk every cent they can from developers - the spoils of their success. Those on the other side would argue that
individual developers are in a weak position, because if they left, they'd only be ceding business to competitors. The only way they could have serious influence at this point would be to get together and threaten to leave iOS en masse (unionise, essentially). The problem with this a) this level of coordination is unlikely to happen, and b) even if it did, moving exclusively to Android would simply transfer the whip hand to Google. Hence the need for legislature to reduce the stranglehold of either platform provider by allowing for multiple marketplaces (amongst other things).
That's just FUD. I didn't take non-existent PR at face value. I'm referring to court findings, specifically in the US and Dutch cases.
FUD's an acronym, and doesn't apply here. The PR is absolutely existent - you said "
Apple has made it clear that the fees they charge aren't for "running its store"". Not that a court had agreed this is the case.