We keep seeing more and more evidence that even large "trusted" developers and publishers are trying to exploit this market. We saw it with both Meta and Google

We keep seeing more and more evidence that even large "trusted" developers and publishers are trying to exploit this market. We saw it with both Meta and Google in the certificates fiasco you linked, but also even in small ways like how news and games publishers aim to improperly charge customers: New York Times and Epic. Even looking at Spotify, they never once passed on the 15% fee savings that apply after a one-year subscription. Yet they constantly decry these fees as a reason they can't lower prices – and now Spotify is 100% a reader app, and they still can't turn a profit. Meanwhile at the same time, what have we seen: 1. Apple reduce fees. New developers and developers who receive less than $1M per year are at a 15% rate. Subscriptions that run over a year are also halved to the 15% rate. 2. Apple providing developers more opportunities to challenge rejections. 3. Apple providing developers even the opportunity to challenge the rules themselves. 4. Report after report (E.g. Nokia's annual Threat Intelligence Report) pointing the prevalence of Malware not on security holes, but on side-loading.(1) More simply if we want to play Occam's razor with this and say it's all about the money: Then Apple's interests lay in protecting and enhancing their platforms because their lion's share of profit comes from device sales, they could reduce app store fees to 0% and while that wouldn't be fair (and likely anti-competitive) it wouldn't destroy Apple's business. While for the majority of the other players have profits come, almost solely, from ads/user data. To such an extent that limiting the flow of this data has had significant effects on their company revenue. (1) https://www.nokia.com/networks/security-portfolio/threat-intelligence-report/ https://www.nokia.com/networks/security-portfolio/threat-int... (see pages 13 and 15 for more detail.)