[coob]

They’d snap your hands off for distribution and marketing costs as low as 30%.

Retail markups were much higher on physical software.

[msh]

For retail software yes, but distributing for next to nothing over the internet was also common (depending on the target group) 20 years ago.

[HatchedLake721]

You mean distributing .mob files on xda-developers and needing to speak with carriers to distribute your app?

There’s a reason most developers moved in droves to Apple ecosystem for amazing APIs, software and hardware, abandoned Symbian/blackberry/etc and had no issues with the 30% fee since they instantly got market access to millions of consumers.

30% was never an issue to begin with. People just feel today that everyone should get access to a marketplace with billion users for free, often forgetting what it took to build this market in the first place.