Who cares what the developer has to pay Apple? Do you care how much the developer pays in rent for his office, or his high speed internet? Maybe the app would be cheaper if the developer pays himself $50/hour rather than $100. All of those costs are part of the app price as well.
I would absolutely care if a new price materialized out of thin air that then got passed off to me. 30% is a lot. I posit that if a new 30% penalty was instilled tomorrow in just about every piece of software you interacted with, you would both notice and care.
I also care when the 30% applies solely by proxy through me. That is to say, since Apple doesn't allow you to differentiate pricing on the Store (IOW, charge 30% more on the App Store), the developer is forced to have me be a lower-value customer than if I used the product through another means. That means that in the developer's eyes, I am necessarily a less important customer, the same way someone that pays for the basic account is lower priority than someone that pays for the Pro account. This is not true of all the other costs you mentioned, rent and salary aren't dynamically changing customer to customer. By placing a 30% fee on the App Store, Apple is obscuring my importance to the developer.
What new price? Apple's 30% has been in place since the App Store opened. Outside of the HN bubble, users have no idea what Apple charges developers, nor do they care. If a customer wants an app, they check the price and determine if they want to pay it or not, just as business is conducted every day all around the world.
If a developer is losing money building apps (most cut their own throat with $.99 apps), they need to increase the price to cover their costs, that's Business 101.
Well, the point of the comment was the demonstrate that a 30% revenue cut is rather onerous through the thought experiment of what would happen if an additional one was placed.
That being said, existing services absolutely went through this sort of increase when customers wanting to use a service with a known pricing model, interacted with the service on this new platform: services that wanted to put their business on the App Store DID have to either add an additional 30% increase across the board, or (as mentioned in the end of the comment), treat App Store-acquired customers as 30%-less revenue generating. Again, from the customer's perspective, which I have repeatedly tried to convey, this is confusing and opaque. Notice that in none of my above comments do I ever lament app developers, and thus do not need a business 101 explanation. I am lamenting that Apple, through a combination of not just placing a large 30% cut, but additionally not giving developers the flexibility to either increase the price of the product by 30% on said platform, created an opaque situation where the customers appears as a lower-revenue generating customer to a business.
This was not imagined, it was discussed quite a bit in the space (especially when the MAC App Store appeared), where EXISTING apps, pre App Store, found themselves in the very unfortunate situation where they hoped people found the app not through the App Store.
