> In which situation does the end user not pay for everything?

In situations where the company needs to continue to compete, and factoring fines into prices would push it out of competitiveness, so it needs to find other ways to offset the fine.

Apple's unlikely to be in this situation, and probably has massive buckets of cash just sitting around in various offshore places anyway. I doubt a couple of billion are much danger.

> apparently people are fine with apple’s practices

I'm happy my mum has a phone that can only install apps and stuff that are sanctioned by apple.

She's not savvy enough to know differently, she doesn't really do apps, and frankly her best defence against any sort of tech-based scammers is likely to be "Oh, well, I wouldn't know how to do that", but otherwise extra-strong rails are a really useful thing.

Monopolies are bad but the current ecosystem is so good, and for me other app stores aren't that interesting. And for some less savvy users they would be an outright threat.