“Here I am — indie developers supporting my family — I've paid Apple over a million dollars. And Meta has paid Apple $100 a year for 17 years. When you just look at it as a logical person in 2025, that just seems bananas.”

The free-app loophole means indie developers subsidise Meta's billion-dollar iOS business

Apple's 70/30 model was designed for paid apps — it was never supposed to handle an ecosystem where companies like Meta, Airbnb, and Uber make billions from iOS without paying a cent in commissions. The result is a structurally inverted fee system where small subscription developers carry the burden and trillion-dollar corporations do not. This asymmetry is now a mainstream developer grievance that will shape every App Store policy debate of the next decade.