> I'd say the $.60 per dollar to rights holders is a much better deal than $.30 per dollar to Apple for payment processing.

You're totally within your rights to think that! (My advice to you: don't start a business literally built on top of Apple's platform!)

> a couple automated API calls to process a monthly payment.

This sort of oversimplification makes it hard to take your argument seriously. I'm pretty sure you don't believe that, but just in case you do…

This article[1] suggests that Apple made $4.2bn from the App Store in the 10 years between 2008 and 2018.

Here are some of the things I would put into the cost lines for Apple's app store P&L (the company operates a combined P&L):

1. Multiple data centres dedicated to the app store and routing third-party notifications. That's both hosting of the apps and ongoing cost associated with e.g. push notifications, software updates. Each of these data centres has energy, staff, hardware costs. That is to say: there is both opex and capex here, which means Apple isn't only netting ongoing costs from revenue but also thinking about the cost of the capital invested in infrastructure up front.

2. The card processing charges associated with customers buying the app in the first place, and subsequent in-app purchases.

3. The cost of Apple's App Review Teams (three dedicated offices: Cork, Shanghai, Sunnyvale). That's 300 people.[2] There are costs behind them, too (for example: recruitment, HR, management).

4. Product and engineering costs associated with the team Apple has working on internal systems and services dedicated to app review.

5. An apportionment of costs associated with customers seeking technical support in-store and online due to third-party apps.

6. An apportionment of costs associated with the development and maintenance of services and APIs which Apple develops and makes available to app developers. (For example, sign-on with Apple.)

In 2018 the app store had seen 130 billion apps downloaded[3], with an average app size of 38mb[4]. That's 4.94 exabytes of data excluding updates.

Microsoft for many years charged Xbox developers for certification of games and patches, in part because of the bandwidth costs of distributing those patches to its customers, but also because providing this sort of service is mired by multiple perilous overheads -- which, I have to say, people on the web tend to misunderstand/ignore/dismiss.

Fortnite has nearly 150 million installs on iOS. It's 1.8 gigabytes. That's 270 million gigabytes, and the game is free. 30% of users don't spend a dime in Fortnite. That's 81 million gigabytes of free bandwidth for Epic, before you forget about the fact that Apple promotes the game etc.

Neither party is a saint here. Apple and Epic both get a lot of out the app being in the store. But Epic has multiple options to resolving this without trying to rob Apple's platform of a significant part of its USP.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/20/18273179/apple-icloud-itu...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/how-apples-app-review-proces...
[3] https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/market-data/data-behind...
[4] https://sweetpricing.com/blog/2017/02/average-app-file-size/