Reading your comment makes me wonder if you have personal experience with the App Store because it’s the kind of criticism I read in tech articles but doesn’t entirely line up with the reality on the ground (if not outright false).

> You're not allowed to have a better price outside of the App Store. iOS users aren't paying for their preferred payment system, it's everyone else subsidizing Apple's cut.

This is simply not true. You’re not required to have price parity with IAPs if you also sell access to the service by other means.

> You're not allowed to give customers a choice of payment methods (people like Apple's subscription, but some may prefer PayPal, especially for multi-platform products). You're not allowed to say they exist outside of the App Store.

This one is half true (if we’re not talking about an app that facilitates purchase of physical goods).
You can’t add a PayPal payment option within the app, but you can direct users to your website to sign up, at which point you can give them any payment option (sans IAP).

There are entire app categories called “reader apps” that specifically utilize this.

> Apple intentionally bundles and mixes together security, convenience, and anti-competitive terms. This confuses the discussion, because if you protest the inflated price, or the unfair terms, they say "oh, so you want users to get malware, huh!?".

To a certain extent the security argument is valid, but more so in terms of app distribution and less so in terms of payments.

> The price is high for what you get

Depends on which price we’re talking about. The 15% or the 30%.

> — an inflexible payment system without ability to offer direct customer support for the payments, and a lottery ticket to maybe appear somewhere else in the store than search results for your app's name, with your competitor's ad first.

Direct support for payments has been made available a while ago. Both in terms of giving the customer a refund as well as in making sure the customer doesn’t receive a refund when they’ve used up consumable purchases.

Caveat is however that it requires a significant backend to utilize these options and most smaller devs prefer that Apple handles this for them.

> Low-margin businesses can't exist with Apple's pricing. Even higher-margin business sucks with Apple - 40% margin is good, but when 30% goes to Apple, Apple earns 3x more than you do.

Again, you’re assuming a 30% cut where most are subject to a 15% cut. Other than that this is a theoretical argument, software generally isn’t a low margin business and has enormous elasticity in terms of margins compared to the production of physical goods.

> If I develop and app, and market it myself, and already have a relationship with my customers, Apple just inserts themselves with a "product" I don't want, my users may not want, but we're forced to buy it.

Again, mainly a theoretical argument. Case in point being the many Mac apps that choose to publish on the MAS in addition to their own distribution methods.

It also completely ignores the value add provided by Apple in terms of developing and maintaining the SDKs and APIs your app depends on, not to mention the toolchain used to create said apps.

The commission is just a way of charging for those services (and defined as such in the developer agreement), other companies might instead charge per seat or, if they’re really stupid, per install.
In the gaming world they charge a hefty price per published build.
While these options might be attractive for bigger developers, it would be prohibitively costly for small indie developers, creating a significant hurdle to entry.

The problem of Apple’s revenue share structure is of course that people start forgetting what they’re actually paying for and quickly start to think they’re just paying for a glorified payment processor.

In practice the points you brought up are non-issues for most small developers, which make up the vast majority of developers on these platforms.
They do however become an issue for big developers, who now, that they’ve picked up steam, would very much like a side letter and try to rile up the smaller indie developers to fight for their cause.