> It is also a better end user experience.

If this was clearly true, Apple would not forbid apps from telling users that other payment methods exist. You don't have to hide alternatives from a user if what you're offering them is the obviously superior service.

It's fairly safe to say that Apple doesn't believe that their user experience is obviously superior. At least, not so obviously superior that customers are willing to pay a 30% surcharge for it. Apple isn't confident that if Patreon told users at the time of checkout, "heads up, this is going to cost you 30% more because you're using the app" that those users wouldn't jump-ship to the browser.

Apple phrases this as the price of iOS overall, that this is the most convenient, user-friendly way to collect a payment that provides value to every iOS user. But again, if they believed that, they wouldn't need to hide it from the user. Apple's policy is not that you can't collect payments through Safari and you have to use an app. Apple's policy is that you cannot tell users about surcharges on the iOS store or advertise lower prices through alternative payments.

This is not the policy of a company that believes it is acting everyone's best interests.

> they can push for services to be unbundled, but not that a company otherwise charges too much for a nonessential product.

I don't know what regulators can and can't force; that depends entirely on the countries and jurisdictions involved. But I do know that as users, we should view a 27% tax on every subscription paid to indie creators as evidence that something has gone wrong with this platform.

It is weird that Apple believes that their ecosystem provides more value per-transaction to indie creators than the actual platform that those creators are using. I know that creators don't agree with that assessment, they're telling users to stop using the app. And it is weird that Apple is not giving Patreon the choice to opt-out of the supposed value that their platform is providing by disabling transactions in the app. I don't know what line you personally use to decide when something becomes rent-seeking, but saying "the platform provides value" isn't enough of a justification; every single rent seeking behavior on the market from every company can be justified by saying "we control access to a valuable resource, we're providing value by providing access."

At a certain point, you have to look at some of this through a the lens of just human sensibility and say, is this what we actually want a phone platform to look like? Do we want a phone ecosystem where 30% of every dollar you donate to some starving creator goes to one of the richest companies on earth? Is that actually representative of the value Apple is adding via iOS, or is it a parasitic, rent-seeking behavior from a platform that uses its userbase as a bargaining chip to extract value from unrelated services on an ever-increasing level?

Of course Apple will tell you that everyone owes them 27% of their revenue regardless, that this is just the easy way to collect it. Literally any company in their position would say that, regardless of what they were doing or why. The question is whether anyone believes them. The question is whether we believe that it's an accident that they've priced their agreements in the UK to be so arduous that you are guaranteed to lose money by leaving their ecosystem. Is that actually unbundling, or is it punitive fees designed to shut down competitors.

Only regulators can decide, but normal people can guess.