It's not remotely comparable. App stores provide, among other things, the CDN for app downloads and updates. I don't know about you, but damn near every app o

It's not remotely comparable. App stores provide, among other things, the CDN for app downloads and updates. I don't know about you, but damn near every app on my phone is getting updates multiple times a week. That bandwidth, and the architecture to provide it at scale up to "hundreds of millions of devices", is not free. Google, for example, provides a massive toolkit of functions and services as part of the Play Store that's not built-in to Android itself. Both companies provide an entire development environment for free. Etc. Also not free is the infrastructure to run the stores, nor provide security and quality review services. Apple does a lot of automated and human inspection of apps, and while it's not perfect in many ways (and perfect is an impossible standard anyway) it's still an important, valuable service that costs a fuckton of money to run. Credit card networks mostly just pass transactions around, with some fraud stuff. Almost everything is handled by the processors and banks. Really, the problem here is that credit cards don't have competition from wire transfer services that are common in the EU, for example. For decades it's been possible to instantly pay another person or a merchant for a product or service and them to see the transfer happened. Zelle is the only thing that comes close in the US, and it was started by a couple of large banks who were fed up with the lack of modernization of the US wire transfer system. We're the laughing stock of the world, taking days for a wire transfer to go through...