The way this should work is that Apple can charge whatever they want for whatever they want but then nobody can be required to use them instead of a third party. So if they want to charge 30% to distribute your app then that's fine, but then you have the option of having someone else distribute your app to customers with iOS (or hosting it yourself), in which case Apple gets 0%.
At which point they might want to get e.g. 5% of something rather than 30% of nothing.
I agree, the end effect should be them charging say "5% of something" and the developer choosing not to bother thinking about external payments. They seem to avoiding this outcome on purpose though. (I dare say Apple might prefer to chase advertising revenue from the app store rather than accept small fees, but they'd risk trashing their own garden).
If the rules are good enough for Apple, they are good enough for everyone.
This might sound like a defence of Apple, and to a small extent it is. But actually, I’m being deadly serious. I think the world would be a better place if these rules applied to everyone.
“But poor Nintendo” rings as hollow to me as “but poor Apple” probably does to you.
I think the legal side of it is, once a precedent like this stands, the cost of going after others reduces significantly. One could argue Nintendo created a closed market for Nintendo apps and abuses their monopoly power in a completely analogous way, and ask the court for completely analogous recourse.
A _better_ solution though would be legislation around freedoms and rights for general purpose computing on any general purpose computing device, rights to repair owned hardware, rights to "own" software paid for, etc. Then you wouldn't need to rely on any monopoly-abuse arguments. The powers that be would have to give up their control (e.g. governments like the notorization thing because they can ask Apple to stop something they consider harmful from being distributed easily, but the requirement to seek notorization clashes with what I perceive as my right to run any program I want on any computer I own) and to be fair having some way to protect the (non-techie) public from malicious software is a reasonable goal (where we could argue over different solutions).