I distinctly remember buying it. Not renting it, buying it.

The apple webpage says

> Why buy iPhone anywhere else?

> When it comes to purchasing a new iPhone, there’s no better place to buy than Apple. For all your questions about payment options and getting your new iPhone set up, we have the answers you need.

You bought the hunk of metal and glass, but you didn't buy the app store servers, the software has a legal agreement and you sign that.

If you don't agree, don't sign it.

What apple store servers comes into the picture when I use my apps (uber, lyft, amazon, candycrush ..) on a daily basis?

I understand a one time fee ($99 or something) for hosting the app and allowing downloads, but why does Apple get an ongoing 30% cut?

Routing push notifications, telemetry, marketing and promotions, sales analytics, they handle all the internationalization of sales such as currency exchange and local sales laws. They also provide cloud storage for core dumps and other crash logs, persistent iCloud storage for user data, and remote build pipelines. That’s just off the top of my head.

And of course the absolutely massive SDK that makes it easy to build all these apps natively without rolling your own computer vision framework or audio processing engine.

So it's not Apples phone?

that's the issue! it should not be apple's phone! i paid for the hardware and current version of the software - anything more should be provided to me out of their goodwill, not because it is their device.

With Android, it's my phone.

Some of them, but that's changing soon.