[ericmay]

> it is simply bizarre seeing these claims like it's some enormous expense that they're doing because they're benevolent.

That's not a claim I've made in any way, shape, or form. Please don't misrepresent things I've written based on your own self-projections.

[defaultname]

Predicting that they're going to charge a "bananas" amount for "hosting and distributing apps" -- ostensibly on the basis of the cost of all of these "free" users (where free means paid enormous amounts for devices based upon this service) -- certainly does seem to make that claim.

[ericmay]

Well, I can tell you with certainty that wasn't the claim that was made.

> ostensibly on the basis

Is where you begin to separate from my comment.

But in the spirit of good conversation, my point was that Apple will collect some fee for companies to be on the App Store, especially the large ones (Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, etc.). They're not going to just say well I guess we won't charge developers anymore. I think the idea with the percentage of revenue was to have the amount taken grow in proportion with the value of the user base and number of users using a particular app, especially if they might have discovered that app on the iOS platform (i.e. lead generation).

If that goes away, there's no reason that I can see that Apple won't say, well we charged you X last year, we estimate that you're deriving Y amount of revenue from the App Store so we're going to charge an annual fee of Z to be on the App Store.