[antonyme]

Good grief, what a loaded headline. It's not a "tax" for a start. It's a fee. And what does the fee cover? PCI DSS Credit card processing services, secure web hosting, worldwide CDN-cached downloads, sales and download analytics, listing in the premier app catalog with many millions of users, marketing exposure for popular/successful apps, and more.

How much would it cost for developers to do all this themselves? Every single individual developer? People seem to forget what things were like before the App Store.

Now one could question the percentage itself, and ask if it is a reasonable number, but when you consider the time and effort and investment that would otherwise be required,