| > access to install base and customer relationship This is the rent seeking that everybody is objecting to. > funds development of the platform, SDK, and tools The platform is open source. So if you want to use someone else's tools then you shouldn't have to pay this part, right? > funds development of the store - funds operation of the store The cost of providing this is negligible. Many alternative stores and repositories do it for free. It accounts for zero percent of the cost of anything. > profit for the company Profit isn't a separate thing. The cost of payment processing already includes the profit of the payment processor etc. > last and least: payment processing Which is the only thing left, so if you're using someone else as payment processor... It's the "access to install base and customer relationship" that they're really sticking it to you for, and that's the illegitimate one. |
> The platform is open source. So if you want to use someone else's tools then you shouldn't have to pay this part, right?
The platform here includes "android", so yes if you aren't using Android you probably don't need to pay to support Android development. It's not clear here, but do you think "open source" somehow means "doesn't require funding to develop"?
> The cost of providing this is negligible. Many alternative stores and repositories do it for free.
Few/none of those provide app review and various anti-malware stuff. You can argue that these have negative value, but they absolutely have non-negligible costs.
Also I don't think any alternative stores support canarying/progressive rollouts of new versions, which is useful for developers and a nontrivial to support for other stores.