Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

This is good for smaller developers, but it doesn't really seem to solve the actual problem? All the people who are willing to go to war with Apple and have teeth are making way more than that…

Yes but many of the larger players who are willing to go to war use the 'its not fair on smaller developers' argument against them.

This really slaps down the ability to use that.

15% is still not fair.

For app store listing and promotion, application delivery all over the world to hundreds of millions of devices, access to back end services like notifications and iCloud storage, and sales transaction processing? Really?

Imagine if you had to develop or pay for all of those services individually. Your own download site, product promotion, services, a third party transaction processor, a content delivery network, bespoke cloud syncing, etc, etc.

Well, the app store cannot exist without app and phone without apps is essentially worthless (unless it has at least the caller app). So who is promoting who? The so called application delivery is just a file server that anyone can setup for peanuts these days. Apple offers no alternative for notifications or storage - there is no competition so they can dictate extortionate prices. Yes many companies would love to run these services on their own, but they can't as Apple is blocking it.