Have you ever totaled up how much money you are spending on Apple's protection every month to verify it is actualy worth it? And are you really sure that same tradeoff makes sense for larger transactions? Like, if someone is spending hundreds of dollars on gas fees or consumable access credits every month, does it really make sense that they should be paying Apple $30/mo for "protection"? If someone gets really into some app and wants to plunk down $1000 for it, is there any amount of protection in the world that makes $300 feel right?
Very little. The devices & OS are otherwise better-enough than the competition (in the case of iOS, the sole competitor, which goes a long way to explaining why the market sucks so bad) that I'd still be buying them absent app store regulations, so that doesn't count, and anyway the premium's pretty low if you're comparing them to actually-comparable products and factor in resale value. I think the 30% cut (which isn't always that high, these days, for smaller players) of my purchases amounts to low-tens of dollars per year and almost all of that is from a single subscription. So, less than I spend on any one streaming service.
