> If I'm Apple, shouldn't it be obvious at this point that losing the App Store monopoly is inevitable? I think Apple believes their own PR story here. They re

> If I'm Apple, shouldn't it be obvious at this point that losing the App Store monopoly is inevitable? I think Apple believes their own PR story here. They really do believe that the App Store is great for everyone, not just them. They really do believe that they're entitled to a generous cut of all transactions that happen on their devices. Objectively, you're right -- although I think I'd go farther and suggest that it actually wasn't inevitable from the start. If Apple had dropped their cut from 30% to 20% five years ago, had looser restrictions on third-party in-app purchases (say, allowing them for "cross-platform digital media" like ebooks), and treated streaming game apps the way they treat other streaming media, those alone might have been enough. Sure, they'd have lost some money that way, but objectively, probably not enough to be worth the risk of going through what they're facing now.