[grenoire]

I understand where your arguments come from, and I do agree to the fundamental economics of it.

It all holds well too, until you realise, however, that Apple is sitting on 200 billion dollars in cash.

Also: Epic did actually give an option to pay less for their microtransactions if you paid them directly, and were about to refund people for their transactions in the past month for the Apple tax itself. Their rebellion is the main reason Apple retaliated like this.

[ghostwriter]

> it all holds well too, until you realise, however, that Apple is sitting on 200 billion dollars in cash.

how does that negate the given points? These 200b is an indicator of a healthy business that can survive major downturns for a long period of time, which should be much more appealing that an open credit line and piles of debt in accounting tables, so much prevalent in the industry nowadays.

[grenoire]

It wasn't supposed to negate his points, I said I agree to them too.

The issue is that Apple would be still be comfortably profitable at a much lower and less predatory level of Apple-tax-rate. They are fundamentally not entitled to the profits of the companies who have to be on their market. The value they provide to the developers and customers collectively for simply hosting and reviewing these apps is not 30%. As other commenters have pointed out, they are willing to pay a portion of this extra 30% if and only if it goes to the people who build the applications. It's not a supply-demand mismatch issue, it's overreach and exploitation.

On the other hand, I don't quite get what your point is about Apple being a healthy business or them not accumulating debt (which is arguably wrong, Apple has ~91,807,000,000 USD in long-term debt (out of 142B USD in non-current liabilities)). I don't think that is relevant here, let alone discounts my point about the excessive profits they've accumulated.

[ghostwriter]

> They are fundamentally not entitled to the profits of the companies who have to be on their market.

that's not how markets work. Apple is absolutely entitled to charge whatever amount of money they wish, firstly because other companies engage into trade with Apple voluntarily and no one is forcing companies into App Store, they enter it because they know they are going to make money there, and secondly because if Apple is not entitled to this money by their right of ownership of the platform that millions of customers find outstanding, everyone else is even less entitled to own and dispose of these earnings.

It is also up to Apple shareholders to decide what is comfortably profitable.

As for the debt that you mention, accounting doesn't work that way either. Their total long-term and current operational debt as of 2020 can be paid in full, by the half of their immediately available disposable cash. This IS a prime example of a healthy business.