I've spent too much time about this... and I have come up with an idea* that is as "free market" as you can get: In the store, when you make a purchase, there is a slider that starts at 30%/70%. As the
purchaser you move the slider to "Store curator" or "App developer" to decide who gets what cut. I wonder what the "free market" would side. Starting at 30%/70% is just because that is what it is "today". Cap it so it can't go further than 98%/2% or 2%/98% or to where the smallest value can be no less than $0.25.
I would bet that 99% of purchasers would just leave it there at 30/70. Then you'll probably have 0.5% of apps or something be pegged 98% to Apple, say (*cough* facebook *cough*) and the other 0.5% pegged 2% to Apple (I dunno, maybe some really popular indie game developer with a loyal following?). Probably nothing in between. Even if you put a "you didn't move the slider, are you sure?" nag in there.
Put another way: the vast majority of purchasers
don't care - it's just the companies.
That argument works both ways: if companies could get 10% more sales volume today by dropping the price 5% - why wouldn't they? This means the "30% commission" isn't what's keeping the price at its level today.
And you have to argue this - for a company to drop its price "to pass on its savings" it must think the volume will go up to make up for the lower prices. For a cut in price to 7/10 its previous value, you have to assume sales increase to 10/7 the previous value for the same total revenue.
The arguments just don't hold water . . . the companies want more of the revenue pie; if they cared about total revenue they would decrease their price already. They are implicitly saying that the prices are already as low as they can go (they are basically claiming that lower prices won't increase sales volume by a greater proportion than the cut in price).
Don't forget - software has essentially zero marginal cost of production. So there is no "cost savings" to pass on to the customer - if Facebook or Epic or Ad Laden Cookie Game Maker gets charged 20% by Apple instead of 30% there is no incentive to cut price.
I would be surprised if that doesn't come up in the lawsuit. I would equally be surprised if the counterargument isn't that if Epic (say) had some of that 30%, they would be able to make more "new products their customers want", but that would be countered by Apple saying they use that 30% to make more of what "their customers want".
*Patent pending. Not really, and in a sane world this would count as prior art, but now that we're in "first to file" instead of "first to invent" I don't know that it would hold water.