alt Hacker NewsAuthor here: Indeed, 15% is fine. They do provide some services. They provide the CDN for downloading the APK. They handle sales taxes in the various countries, which would be a PITA to handle yourself. Similar-ish services like Patreon charge a fee too. The 30% they charged a couple of years back was bad. But I could live with 15% if the support were anything other than zero.
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Apple recently submitted in court filings that you'd have to pay ~8% for off-the-shelf solutions like Stripe or Paddle to be Merchant of Record anyway so 15% isn't really bad except for the high-earning apps, but Google should be doing something for that extra 7%.
They also develop the OS and development platforms that the apps are built upon. The apps don’t exist on islands.
The problem is that it ISN'T a fee for services as it should be. Their platform power means that they can levy a tax, and they don't feel the need to do anything on exchange for that.