Re: 30% is extortion, pure and simple
"But Apple are the ones hosting the content, and providing a trusted (for certain values of trust) environment for users to acquire your goods (not services)."
No they are not !!!!!
Apple are providing the store which is used to deploy the app to a device. Once the app is downloaded onto a users phone the app is free to make API calls where ever it likes. It's up to the companies running the apps to then have sufficient capacity elsewhere for the app to function.
If I create an el-reg app that allows you to read the content, login, vote and post Apple are not magically going to magically host all of the content. Additionally I'd have serious issues if Apple proxied all requests through their servers.
I'm all for Apple charging fees directly related to their store and for offering a payment service, but those should be reasonable. Bandwidth on the backbones is cheap so the store costs shouldn't be that much. The payment service should be on par with what Visa and Mastercard cost (probably a little extra for the convenience of not needing to process the transactions yourself). The cost to Apple is no where near 30%
Biting the hand that feeds IT
