These are in-app purchases, right? Imagine if Walmart demanded a 30% cut not of merely the sale price for anything they sold you, but had a policy that any later sale that that product caused--such as an app on a phone, if the phone was purchased for Walmart ;P--had to use Walmart.com's billing and they were entitled to a 30% cut... and then place that ridiculous scenario in a world where half the people in the US only could shop at Walmart and the other half only could shop at Target (and it would cost the user $500 to switch stores and then they would only be able to use the other store). If you want to say that apps shouldn't be free with later purchase, that would at least make more sense? Like, sure: Walmart isn't going to stock and hand out phones for free. But I feel like the honest version of that business makes it so that app developers just pay Apple for hosting fees--which would correlate with downloads, not revenue--which is how all of this really should work.

> If some other App Store, 'App Store B' were preloaded on every device, and App Store were not, then that 'App Store B' would ultimately be 'that much better'.

Did you enjoy your Fire phone, because that's exactly what you're describing. Somehow people decided they did not like it...