The ideal state is healthy competition where consumers can choose to interact with the platform they want, and platforms need to reduce their cuts of revenue to be competitive.

Platforms leveraging their market position to keep shares of revenue at 30% is insane.

How is it insane? I shipped an app and made some decent money. How much did Apple / Google do for me? Well, without the app stores and hardware sales I estimate I would have made $0.

There is value in building and maintaining an ecosystem. I get they nobody likes paying a middleman, but there is value there.

Because the ecosystem value cuts both ways. The thriving ecosystem is what causes people to buy so many apple products in the first place, and keep coming back to them. Apple's sales benefit hugely from the app market. App makers aren't simply leaches, which is basically what your (and many others') argument amounts to.

It is insane because you are willfully accepting an environment where a company forbids competition against itself using its market position in a different market (hardware).

It’s great that they provide this service to you. But if they had competition it would be way cheaper and better

Sure, but by that logic we should do away with patents and copyrights. As a consumer, once someone has invested the energy and money to produce something, it’s better for me if someone else can clone it and sell it cheaper.

But that’s not good long term. If there’s no reward for success, there’s no incentive to risk failure.

This statement is stupidly unqualified. Yes, we should reward investments and inventions. No, that broad sentiment does not suffice to support Apple getting to tax all software at 30% by virtues of their hardware market control And forbidding competition against themselves.