> Apple’s policies remained the same.

No… they didn’t stay the same. Apple has changed their policies, numerous times. In this specific case, it is easy to point to the changelog that added person to person classes as something that owes Apple 30% commission.[0] Many large companies' lawyers clearly interpreted the guidelines to not include such events until Apple updated the guidelines, or else Apple would not have updated the guidelines and talked to the press about it. I don't think you have much ground to stand on here.

Also, whether an activity is physical or virtual should be entirely irrelevant. It was never communicated to me when I moved into the iOS ecosystem, nor was it in the App Store guidelines. Yet... you think it is unreasonable that customers should be given the same freedom from monopolies that they have when it comes to other physical and online retailers?

Apple continues to move the goal posts on what people owe them money for, both by expansion of what the App Store is intended to contain and expansion of their rules, and it is detrimental to both consumers and businesses, who are both locked into Apple's ecosystem and have little to no choice in the matter at this point. If you like monopolies, then cool, but... I believe Apple needs to make some serious changes, and it is clear that I'm not alone in these thoughts.

On a related note, if Apple will properly support PWAs (including push notifications, which have been rumored to finally be making an appearance 6 or 7 years after Android did it), then that will dramatically change the balance of the equation. Very few companies offer PWAs because they lack push notification support, which they consider to be essential. Many HNers like to act as if push notifications are just an annoyance and that they prefer not to have them... but that's an irrelevant opinion outside of HN. I don't think lowering the App Store commission or allowing unrestricted, revenue-free sideloading are the only options... I think properly supported PWAs are a perfectly valid third option for most use cases, and I would care a lot less about this issue when that happens. PWAs already do not need to report any of their revenue to Apple, and that should remain the case forever, unless Apple is planning to start charging for the privilege of using websites. (To head off one obvious digression, no, Apple absolutely doesn't deserve to charge for providing push notifications... it's an essential feature of literally any smartphone, and they were paid for that service when the consumer bought the phone. Apple also doesn't let anyone else run a competing notification service on the phone using a background process to hold open a network connection. If Apple doesn't like offering notifications for free, they should feel free to raise the prices of the phones they sell, but they should have been pricing that in from the beginning. Chrome and Firefox don't charge money to provide push notifications either, and they weren't even paid a single cent by either the user or the developer. But, if Apple were to charge less than a cent per notification the way that developers have to pay for SMS messages, it wouldn't be the end of the world. 30% of all transactions just to use notifications? No, that's not reasonable under any circumstance.)

[0]: "3.1.3(d): Person-to-Person Experiences" https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=xqk627qu