Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

Agreed. Delivery drivers don't take a percentage from every sale you make. They charge for the service.

App stores should charge for their service. They aren't making the sales (at least in most cases). They are delivering assets. Charge for the delivery.

I know somebody will start claiming that Apple created the market in the first place. Apple benefits from the large app selection just as much as the developers do - yet the relationship only works one way. Let's delete the App Store and see how well the iPhone does against Android.

Try to run a business for free and come back in few years to tell us how it goes.

They are charging for the manual work of checking apps, making sure your app exists in a fair market place and its not surronded by fake, malware infested nightmares.

Whether this is worth 30% is arguable, but they are not charging for the delivery, they are charging for keeping the garden trimmed.

App review is a one off task. They could charge the review fee and that's it. If they wanted more money they could charge data transfer fee similar to Amazon's S3. The 30% or 15% has no justification and it is just a cash grab because app developers can't go to an alternative app store with better terms. I am hoping that EU will stop this abuse.

They should actually be paying small developers based on app usage. This will also be in their interest

Well, to be fair, according to apple it accounts for less than 5% of their $500bn revenue..