> By the same logic BestBuy, Verizon, and other hardware retailers should get a cut of Apple’s revenue.
Best Buy, Verizon, and other hardware retailers buy Apple products at a discount and sell them for retail price. So, in a way they do get a cut of the revenue that Apple would make when Apple sells products at Apple's retail stores.
When Develop X sells IAP for their app, Apple demands a cut. Apple didn't ship that IAP or have anything to do with it.
When Apple collects their cut from an app, they don't pass any portion of that on to Best Buy, who sold that device.
Apple insists that Developer X wouldn't have made that profit without Apple's support, and they're due that cut. By that same logic, Best Buy is due a portion of that because they enabled Apple to make that money in the first place.
It's bonkers, which is why everyone's mind rejects that Best Buy would be entitled to anything of the sort. But Apple has managed to sell that line somehow.
> When Develop X sells IAP for their app, Apple demands a cut. Apple didn't ship that IAP or have anything to do with it.
Apple provides hosting for IAP content, if developers wish to use it
> When Apple collects their cut from an app, they don't pass any portion of that on to Best Buy, who sold that device.
So far I don't believe Best Buy has asked for such a thing. They do ask for fees on things like customer acquisition for cellular plans AFAIK. In the past they have gotten customer acquisition fees for other subscription services, such as ISPs.
Apple's various stores are based directly on this same model (portion of revenue on directly sold products, money for customer acquisition on subscriptions).
> Apple insists that Developer X wouldn't have made that profit without Apple's support, and they're due that cut. By that same logic, Best Buy is due a portion of that because they enabled Apple to make that money in the first place.
Apple has looser restrictions for so-called reader apps (for consuming digital alternatives of physical goods), but generally their restriction is that a consumer-directed app be usable without requiring out-of-app purchasing, and that apps do not direct users to out-of-app purchasing options (either marketing their availability or linking to them).
This is again analogous to what you would expect in a brick-and-mortar store. For example, subscription revenue games are way harder to negotiate for sale at a Best Buy than episodic content. There is no way you'd see such a storefront stock a game that sold for $.99 but required a $19.99/month subscription to play without the retailer getting a major acquisition payback.
A better comparison would be to compare a wild fictitious example against another retailer, Whole Foods.
It would be wild to imagine Amazon selling a high quality refrigerator that only allowed you to place perishable items from Whole Foods inside of it. Independent of whether Whole Foods was selling things at a reasonable rate and of reasonable quality, the expectation is that you would not need to purchase a different brand of refrigerator in order to get food from other markets. No matter what sort of concessions they made, such as offering to sell food at lower margin for local farmers and smaller suppliers, the mere existence of such a closed system would offend some people.
But ironically, those people are just as likely to buy into in other closed systems without blinking an eye. Perhaps they have an EV which is only repairable by its manufacturer. Perhaps they have a game system which requires games to be sold in its store or be pressed onto its CDs, and requires hundreds or thousands of dollars for game developers to sign up to participate. Perhaps they have a smart thermostat or smoke detector which refuse to interoperate with any other vendor.
The reality is that people are offended by the grocery example because they _understand_ the grocery example. Enough to feel that some company is pushing them through bizarre restrictions because of the revenue model they chose to pursue. And those restrictions impact them.
