On the other hand, devs wouldn't be able to sell to iPhone users if there was no iPhone, or no App Store, or the appleid.apple.com identity verification system, or iOS 14, or anything else that is paramount to devs even having those users as customers in the first place. In this scenario, the iPhone is the product and the App Store is a feature of the iPhone, and the fact that it moves money around (or doesn't, most of the time) is irrelevant.

Now, the legal view of Apple's ecosystem is being litigated right now. What I posted above might be how the court sees it, or what you posted might be how the court sees it. We won't get a definitive answer until either Epic or Apple go home with the key to processing payments on iOS and all of the other systems that are effectively an iPhone with a different form factor (eg PS5, xbox series).

Whether you consider the developers a customer of Apple paying for distribution, or a supplier to Apple who takes a cut, is ultimately a semantic distinction. But the conflict of interest it creates — that Apple retains a monopoly on how software is distributed to a device that you ostensibly “own” and sets rates to optimize for their own gain - is the case regardless of the semantics we use.

(I’m not entirely opposed to this arrangement; I’m typing this on my iPhone. But I bought it knowing and accepting that I’m partly the product)

When you go into a grocery store, do you consider yourself the product and that the food producer has purchased access to you from the store?