[hinkley]

When the App Store launched, 30% was a huge improvement to the rates extracted in the walled gardens the mobile carriers were running.

Ten years ago 30% was entirely defensible. That it hasn't budged at all is a little weird. If it had notched down to 25% and then to 22% with a hope on the horizon of 20%, I think a lot fewer people would be so salty.

In-app purchases are a tricky one, for game-theoretical reasons. With in-app purchases your base app can be a loss-leader, and in an ecosystem where 'free' is allowed then you make more money with in-app purchases than you would with a monolithic app. We are already overusing in-app purchases, if Apple made them cheaper then everything would be in-app purchases. In-app purchases also make QA harder, so whatever curation power they have is diluted and usually not in a good way.

My heart says in-app purchases should have a lower tax, because Apple is doing less of the work. But my brain says that the opposite is the case.

What is really hurting the people I know (which admittedly isn't many) is that upgrade prices aren't really a thing in the App Store. They don't even have bundling options like Steam. Which means you have to cobble something like it together via in-app purchases.