[LegitShady]

The upkeep of the Apple store ecosystem is easily found within its margins on taking money from developers plus billions in profits. This page is telling you how they're classifying it for tax reasons. There is no need to charge $100 or even $20 like Microsoft.

This page is an excuse. There is no reason except greed and corporate accounting.

[ksec]

>and corporate accounting.

Yes. That page align with Apple Accounting. Since 2017 Apple has been putting iOS cost and development, SDK as part of their Services Strategy expenses.

In a sense Apple is now think you are buying iPhone just as Hardware ( with huge margins ), and you are paying for all the development of iOS, macOS through their Services Revenue coming from App Store and Google Search.

In Steve Jobs days Apple used to lump all those together as one product. But now you are basically renting the usage of iOS and Apple experience Hence from Apple's POV the user aren't even paying enough for the usage of iOS.

[lovelyviking]

One can make a case that people learn to breath merely to prepare themselves to rent Apple services and not paying enough untill they do in Apple's POV.

But there is another POV. One that includes rights of a person to be a human being rather then income source for some company. One of those rights should be ability to install whatever software you choose on your own computer without any artificial restrictions.

[LegitShady]

I think you kind of missed the point. It's all fiction and greed.