The larger point is that they've apparently never been charging appropriate developer costs to reflect the value of what they were offering (according to them I mean)
It's a disservice to all sides when sub market rates are charged to get you hooked into an ecosystem (to Apple's enormous benefit), as opposed to a more clear and fair for both sides arrangement up front
It's all a question of how you structure the pricing, so you get back a sustainable return on the service offered. Apple could have chosen, say, "no commission on apps in the store, but you have to pay a $100,000 fee for the developer kit, to support ongoing API and store maintenance costs", but that would have locked out millions of smaller developers from participating. There could have been a variety of other payment schemes as well.
(I worked for a company once where they charged a modest amount for the software itself, but with a necessary support contract, and a lot of clients wanted to buy 50 or 100 copies of the software, but only pay for support on one copy - where, all the support needed throughout the whole company, any problem experienced, would "conveniently" be with that one
supported copy of the software. Yeah, that was a bit of a struggle. Pricing schemes are difficult to get right, in a way that lets all customers small and large get treated fairly, without someone gaming the system.)
Apple chose the commission approach, for better or worse, and made it apply to
everything, because they could reasonably foresee that if, say, they charged a commission on app sales, but allowed 3rd party payment systems, then every single app in the store would have been "free to download (then pay us $10 on our website)", and Apple wouldn't have made enough back to cover expenses, much less any sort of profit.
I think Apple's commission prices are a bit too high, and I think they should have made allowances for things like emulators (and Microsoft's cloud gaming thing? and such), but that's Apple's decision, not mine.
