Many of those are things where the value of a single user is very low and then you need a significant audience just to earn an ordinary salary.
> Software has near 0 marginal costs
But it has significant development costs, and the fact that you're required to use Apple's store makes them even higher, because their restrictions are incompatible with free software licenses, which locks you out of even using LGPL code on iOS, much less anything else.
Apple's hardware has those fancy chips in it, right? Suppose you want to create a front end for Blender and run it on iOS. Your front end doesn't have to use the same license as Blender itself if it's a separate program, so you could charge for it. But Blender is GPL so you can't run it on iOS at all. Then you'd have to write Blender yourself, by which point you're talking something that would need a million a year in revenue, and a 30% deadweight loss could very well make the difference between viable and not.
It's also incredibly disheartening, because you do the work and take the risk and then if you actually succeed you know someone else is going to cut out a huge chunk of the revenue, which discourages people from making the attempt.
> Well known publishers have tried the pay $10 once for a premium game on iOS and users wouldn’t pay for it.
Which is kind of weird when they're empirically willing to do it on other platforms, right?
But that's what happens when you establish a reputation for being capricious while taking a large cut. Who wants to make a significant investment into a platform when the platform is eroding their profits and there is a non-trivial chance they could be arbitrarily cut off at any time with no recourse? At which point the users come to expect apps to be scummy and become disinclined to pay for them up front.
