alt Hacker NewsRight, and my point is that the technology is already fully paid for by the user. By "the SDK" I meant the dev environment stuff, not the API base on the phone.
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> Right, and my point is that the technology is already fully paid for by the user.
That's your claim. Neither Apple nor the EU appear to agree. Nor do US courts appear to agree in the Epic v. Apple trial.
Apple itself has to pay license fees for some technologies in iPhone, and those licenses do not automatically extend to third-party developers via the consumer. It's not a license agreement with the consumer.
When you said, "there's no way to signal to Apple that you have opted out of using their SDK and have the fee waived", which fee did you mean exactly? The quote in your comment refers to the Core Technology Commission, which is a percentage of app revenue. There's also the $99 developer program fee, which all App Store developers pay.
I know that some developers are annoyed by the $99 fee, but for professional iOS developers, $99 is a drop in the bucket, and the revenue % cut is the vastly larger and more important thing. So if by "the SDK" you mean only the header files and such, that seems like mostly a red herring to me, and if you were allowed to use the technology for free, then there wouldn't be much reason for Apple to charge for the SDK. And indeed, Xcode has always been available for free. https://apps.apple.com/app/xcode/id497799835?mt=12
> the technology is already fully paid for by the user
This seems like a very large and unfounded assumption on your part, particularly in a world where we no longer pay for Apple operating systems or their updates.