> I vehemently disagree. When a user buys a game, where does their money go?

Microsoft
Sony
Nintendo
Ubisoft
Epic
Valve
Square Enix

etc...

I just don't really care if Apple gets a larger cut of the venue or if these large corporations do. Even on Desktop things aren't that great. My friends and I wanted to play Civ VI recently and they were on the Epic game store and I had purchased the game on Steam and they weren't compatible for cross-platform play. I know that's mostly a one-off, but it's not like I can buy Nintendo's games on Steam, nor can I transfer my license of Elden Ring on Xbox to my Epic Game Store.

None of this helps small developers they just now have to publish their games to multiple app stores which you may or may not have or may or may not want to set up an account for and you're paying Epic 17% instead of Apple.

Of course you can argue (and should, in my view) that those things suck and we shouldn't support those things either and I would agree! But where I disagree is then saying well Apple's the only malicious actor here. They're all in it together.

> Pending evidence, you're just wrong. As a user of Android I will tell you from firsthand experience that my absolute favorite apps would not exist without sideloading. MacOS and Windows simply wouldn't have games at all if their distribution terms weren't free enough to attract publishers. And if you sort the iOS app store by top-grossing games, you'll quickly realize that the iPhone doesn't have real games either. Publishers like Nintendo left after their initial experiments - others like Epic and Microsoft were literally forced to leave.

Well, it is a recent change. So yes it is pending evidence. If Epic and Microsoft left it's because they want to gain control and more of the Apple revenue slice instead of paying out. Neither helps small game developers. Most of the limitation on mobile for gaming is that mobile gaming sucks and always will because the interface is bad compared to keyboard and mouse or a controller.

> You say that Epic's fee is just as bad as Apple's, but you don't substantiate how that's worse for users. Having two similar fees encourages competition - it creates an incentive to innovate in delivery and provide a superior service to users. Apple can charge twice as much if they want, but they (same as Epic) have to justify their pricing for it to compete fairly. Currently Apple answers to no one, which creates an obvious price fixing incentive on their behalf. This is demonstrably anticompetitive.

Well as a user now I have to install yet another app that has my payment information and its own arbitrary rules. I might forget what App Store has what app. Maybe Epic makes me agree to some privacy considerations that Apple didn't in order to play their game and they only publish this "must-have" game on their store so they can collect data on me.

As someone who uses a Mac it's frustrating that not all games work on macOS. Why does Microsoft get to release Age of Empires only on the Windows-only Xbox Game Store (or whatever)? That's ok? There's a lot more of these dark patterns going on than these companies are leading you to believe.

YMMV but stores are incentivized to conduct activities to keep people using their store. Sometimes it's helpful to users and results in lower cost, other times it results in gatekeeping and other things that suck. My point is just that it's not a net moral good, but instead it's neutral and probably worse for developers since they have more bureaucracy to deal with and users since they have to deal with all of these app stores and payment mechanisms and whatnot.

> Have you ever considered that it's not contrarian, and just wrong?

I've considered it, and then considered that it's not wrong and it's just contrarian to what most people here on HN think.

Most people day-to-day don't really care about this and just prefer a single App Store, but then on HN people who like to jailbreak their phones and install and tinker with their phones and want lots of app stores with apps and are over-represented here.