If developers bothered to put their apps on alternative stores with much lower rates, we wouldn't be in this mess. Amazon is shutting down their store because it turns out nobody is really all that interested in actual alternatives. Samsung has their own store but all I hear about it is people bitching that they already have Google Play and that it's "bloatware".

Huawei even sells phones without Google Play in the west! Of course the first thing people try to do on them is get Google Play working, because the cheap hardware is all people care about.

Sure, Apple has proven to be pretty shit about app cost, but Android does and always has offered alternative app stores, and it's the leading example of how much companies like Epic are lying through their teeth.

Consumers pay the 30% app tax on Android because the companies claiming to want to get rid of it don't actually want to invest in alternatives, they just want Apple and Google to host their games for free so they can make more money.

The same goes for a lot of these monopolies. People want options, but they don't want to pay for options. The result is a quick race to the bottom where only a few high-profit, low-margin companies dominate the market.