but if you run on their OS and use apps that take advantage of iCloud or push notifications or any host of apple services, none of that is free. those apps are getting tools and support and features as well as OS APIs to use.
Then charge people for it. Developers are the people enabling and exposing this functionality, not the ones using it. Apple gives away the Apple services and iCloud functionality to all of their users - if these are expensive then it makes no sense to charge the developers for it. By your logic, this "expensive OS" theory should be amortized by an iOS subscription service - but it's not. Apple chooses to develop iOS, it is not democratically compensated somehow by the success of the App Store.
Orwell himself warned of the "perversions to which a centralised economy is liable", maybe the company that spoofed 1984 should take it to heart. The optics of the world's largest business doubling-down on their right to control what their customers use is a bit dystopian, if I say so myself.
