[nkrebs13]

I'm not the person you're asking, but I can probably try to explain.

Take other payment processing platforms like Stripe as an example. Stripe charges $0.30 + 2.9% to process a purchase.

To help build your (and my) mental model: Price of item -> Stripe revenue (rounded)

$1 -> $0.33

$5 -> $0.45

$100 -> $3.20

Apple's 30% cut makes sense if they were expecting most apps to be roughly $0.99 (anecdotally, I remember this being true during the early days of the App Store) and the (presumed) few apps that cost more than $1 would be the "whale" developers that would subsidize Apple software development. But nowadays apps are a lot more powerful, feature-full, and development-intensive so higher prices are required for any hope of profit.

So the math you have is right, it's just that the path to profit is a lot harder when the ONLY way to sell your product is to have >=30% cut out immediately upon sale. Some stores set a minimum (e.g. $5) sale amount for using a credit card and those payment processing platforms have fees orders of magnitude less than Apple's App store