Valve takes 30% of direct sales through steam but allows developers to generate and sell separately steam keys where they get a 0% cut, as I understand it. For instance when you buy a game on humble bundle and get a steam key for it, valve makes nothing off that transaction.
Unless Apple and google start allowing sales outside their stores I don’t think steam is comparable.
Google Play and the Apple App Store are completely different beasts. Unless you jailbreak your iOS device, there is no way to install apps outside the App Store. On Android, you can install entirely separate stores, like the Amazon one, and several OSS-focused stores.
That’s not completely true, as I understand it. You can (or could a couple of years ago) get an ‘enterprise’ developer account that allows you to sign and provision apps to be sideloaded via a web link. Though iirc it’s more hassle for the end user as they have to explicitly allow it on their device.
DINKDINK’s reply above is more relevant. If you try using an enterprise cert to allow general public users to install your app you’ll quickly lose your enterprise cert. The enterprise cert is only to be used for internal company apps.
This is accurate but they've started getting antsy about free steam keys. I think it's due to pay-what-you-want bundles but they haven't really given any official statements, it's just second-hand from various developers. I suspect the policy on free keys may change now that literally anyone can toss a game up on the store and we've started seeing people maliciously manipulate the system (games that mine bitcoins and have in-app purchases designed to defraud users). They already made changes to filter out reviews from people who got game keys "for free" because of that sort of manipulation.
I suspect they'll either put a limit on # of free keys or start charging per key, something like 5% of your listed retail price.
There's a bigger difference: Steam competes on "open" platforms (i.e. the major OSes), where "open" means anyone could launch a competing service (and I fully expect another one to challenge Steam in the near future considering the way Steam is heading).
No one can launch a competing app service on iOS. Apparently you can on Android, but I'm not sure why no one succeeded yet. Maybe the same reason as no one succeeded yet replacing Steam either, you need some kind of critical mass and that takes time to build.
Unless Apple and google start allowing sales outside their stores I don’t think steam is comparable.