I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but the most basic thing I do not get about these complaints is if the people making them have ever seen the markup and

I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but the most basic thing I do not get about these complaints is if the people making them have ever seen the markup and overhead that goes into retail sales of physical products? It's not like I can manufacture a product, send it to Walmart or Bestbuy or whatever, and expect them to only add a few percent on top for credit card processing fees, so I can reap almost all the potential profit. I realize what some developers are looking for is a way to directly reach consumers. Have they ever tried to ship physical products to consumers? Logistics takes a lot of effort. Sure, we're talking about software so the "shipping" costs are so small that it's hard to even measure on a single download of an app. However there's a whole virtual storefront with curation, ratings, security, payment processing, and the APIs and hardware platform trust that comes along with it. If we go back to the physical store analogy, a lot of indie developers are getting value from being featured in the Apple or Google stores. It's a little like a large national retailer picking up some startup's product to feature in their stores. Or it's like being allowed to open a small store in a mall with major anchors. It means that the mass market will see your product and will trust it better than if you have some small shop off in some weird low rent location. Maybe 30% is too much for this, or maybe the app review process should be better, or maybe developer support should be better, but acting like the platform and the store don't cost anything to maintain, and aren't worth anything seems really naive.