Developers are not Apple's customers - the people who buy the devices are. Those people have freely chosen Apple and continue to do so. There is another way t

Developers are not Apple's customers - the people who buy the devices are. Those people have freely chosen Apple and continue to do so. There is another way to look at Apple's cut, even when you as a developer consider it unfair. For the end users it establishes a certain amount of credibility. Apple places certain hoops developers have to go through as well as taking some money. An end user is going to find a solution that can do all that far more credible than one that can't. It is different now, but a few decades ago one of the functions of advertising was credibility. If a product was advertised, it meant there was an aura of success about it (the money to advertise has to come from somewhere and someone has to stand behind it) and that success was sufficiently great to spend some of the revenue on ads. The bigger the ad spend, the more credible/success there is perceived to be. Everyone will be a lot more skeptical about something that can't even afford to advertise, or does so "cheaply". The same thing is happening with university education. Someone attending one, spending real money and persevering is more credible than someone taking a few online courses, even though the actual education they could get is similar. Circling back to Apple, the app store is already saturated, and I suspect Apple will be more than happy to raise the bar some more. The most credible apps are what they and the users will want. Imagine they added a section for folks like you "these apps use none of our services and we take no cut from them". That section would smell like failure, not success.