Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, published a blog post with “7 myths Apple is using to justify their 30% tax on apps”. He explains quite well why Apple’s practices are not fair and disproves many arguments that you can regularly read from Apple fans on Hacker News or in comments on tech news sites.

Developers don’t really have a choice between iOS and Android: if they want to create a service that is socially relevant, they will have to build apps for both platforms in the mobile duopoly. Try to imagine Telegram or TikTok as Android-only apps and you will quickly understand why avoiding Apple is impossible. You can’t just exclude iPhone users. As for the iPhone users, the costs for consumers to switch from an iPhone to an Android is so high that it qualifies as a monopolistic lock-in […].

Personally, I think it’s time for legislation to break Apple’s monopoly, but I guess Apple will win in the end, because they will invest all the money they rip off developers in lobbying.

We shouldn’t sit idly and let Apple’s lobbyists and PR agents do their thing. At the end of the day, it is up to us – consumers and creators – to defend our rights and to stop monopolists from stealing our money. They may think they have tricked us into a deadlock, because we’ve already bought a critical mass of their devices and created a critical mass of apps for them. But we shouldn’t be giving them a free ride any longer.