>Apple (rightfully) became the market leader, but is essentially running what should be a public market.

They became the market leader (and I say this as an Android person who dislikes Apple and would never own one) because it's not a public market - they offer a "premium" experience, and part of that is the heavily curated app store. Opening up the platform would undermine the whole reason why it's popular to begin with. As long as you aren't using a jailbroken device (and there aren't any current 0-day attacks, which are rare) you don't have to worry about downloading random malware or side-loading something nasty.

Not to mention that it would prevent Apple from enforcing things like sign-in with apple ID, which again reduces user convenience and undermines the reason apple products are popular in the first place. People buy Apple devices because they "Just Work" and are willing to trade away control of the device to get that convenience - there's no real difference between an iPhone and a flagship Samsung phone (for example) in terms of hardware quality, it's all about slickness and ease of use.

>If one company took over all the physical land on the planet, and had everyone sign agreements to essentially pay taxes to them with every transaction, would we still argue that that’s not only legal, but morally justified?

Do you not believe there is a significant ongoing cost relating to the Apple store? Bandwidth, storage, CDN, power and HVAC for equipment, other building / data centre costs, IT staff for maintaining the servers and services, developers to develop the store and maintain Apple's side of the arms race between malicious devs trying to fool Apple's automated checking and Apple trying to detect and prevent malicious apps being uploaded, other miscellaneous overheads (accounting, auditors, etc.)... why should they be prevented from collecting taxes to cover the costs?

I'm sure it would be profitable for Apple to some degree, but not nearly as much as people seem to believe - IIRC something like two billion iPhones (not sure if that includes other iOS devices or just the phones) of various makes have been produced, and almost all of those will have checked in regularly to the store for updates and installing new stuff over the course of the devices lifetime - how much bandwidth do you think that would use? Apparently the (ballpark) storage on a device consumed by an install of fortnite on iOS is around 8GB, multiplied by 100 million downloads... That would not all be concurrent and earlier install would have been lighter, and how much of that comes through Apple vs. Epic's own CDN I do not know (e.g. if they can distribute game content themselves), but in any case I'm sure it is still a massive load on the store IX.

I hate to rant like this but the whole "ApPlE gReEdY" argument with no consideration of the costs involved is really irritating, and I've been seeing it everywhere since the dispute over Fortnite kicked off - I don't know the actual figures but I'm sure there are massive ongoing costs involved in running the Apple store. Putting a significant burden on that infrastructure and then complaining when you get kicked off for not contributing to it is an incredible display of gall on Epic's part.