Back in the day, it was novel that google had an influential chief economist. It made sense. Adwords is an auction. Doubleclick's novelties in search ad auctions were proven levers, big levers.
The interesting part (to me) was that the auction didn't just optimize price. It regulated advertiser behaviour. Explicit feedback. Black box. Commentary on black box. It all played a role influencing advertiser behaviour in an economist/regulator way.
These days, that would be quaint. Google has the android ecosystem and play store marketplace. Adwords/adsense is a market too, one that has been dinged for >$1bn monopolism fines. Youtube is a marketplace. Youtube affect content with monetisation algorithms and policies, the recommendation engine, censorship/classification. Appstore. Amazon. Big "markets," with corporate policies looking increasingly like state-scale economic policies.
Even stuff like social media is market-ish. Lots of participants are interacting. Attention& influence stand in for prices, but there are still producers and consumers. Many of them. More than FB can understand in all but the most abstract ways.
The search/seo/antispam codependency was an early exhibit.
Anyway.... besides the superficial similarity, I suspect the logic to this new app store policy is more "tax cut" than "price decrease." My guess: Apple's trying "fix market failures" showing up in data.