Startups aren’t paying 30% of sales unless they have more then $1 million in revenue coming through the App Store, they are selling access to digital goods and even then, they can still sell access to subscriptions and services outside of the App Store and now they can link directly to their website from the App Store thanks to the courts ruling - at least in the US.

Many startups are still losing money at $1M ARR. So getting a bump up to 30% of revenue at $1M can be catastrophic.

Investors don't want large percentages of pre-profit money being siphoned off by Apple.

Generally speaking, an optimized win-win fee would be some percentage of profits, not revenue.

That might be far too difficult to manage, accounting wise. But we can safely say that 30% of revenue, would translate to an extreme percentage of profit. Apple is extorting from many companies.

One sign of anticompetitive behavior is when a company is leveraging things in their favor so hard, it seems quite plausible that they are actually harming themselves. Killing of developers, by charging massive fees even to money losing developers, is not a good long term strategy.

But the power to extract money even from those it causes real pain, is hard to turn down when quarterly numbers keep coming up.

>they can link directly to their website from the App Store thanks to the courts ruling - at least in the US.

In Apple. fashion, they are still pushing back on this despite the court ruling. It only shows more so why Apple needs to be made to open up.