> But I can also see the clutter argument.

I don't understand the "clutter" argument at all. What does it matter if there are a billion apps? You already need a functioning system to show the better ones at the top whether the worse ones are 50% of the total or 99%.

On top of that, this isn't about their store anyway. They're charging this fee to the people not using their store.

> Windows app store has been and still is a nightmare to use.

The big problem with all of these is that they're charging too much. Apple takes 30% because they ban the alternatives. People only use Windows because they have dependencies on legacy software distributed outside the store, so Microsoft can't ban that or there would be no reason to use Windows. And when you don't have to use the vendor's store, they can't even get away with charging 15%, because it turns out platform stores are actually worthless.

Because people want platforms to provide both of two separate things. First, they want the long tail. They're a chemist or a mechanic or a photographer or a farmer and they want that half-finished app some grad student in Minsk wrote ten years ago that does the thing only people in their specific sub-specialty care about. And second, they want a curated list of apps so that when they're looking for a messaging app or a finance app it only shows the ones that don't steal their contacts and sell their financial records to data brokers.

The problem with platform stores is that they try to do both things at once, which isn't possible. Either the store has everything or it doesn't.

What you actually want is for there to be stores that only contain the curated stuff and simultaneously a reasonable means for ordinary people to install things from the long tail. Because sometimes you don't know which one to trust, which is when you want the store, and other times you know exactly what you want to install because this time it's your field and you and your colleagues are the experts, even though the store has no means to vet an app their reviewers don't understand and only 100 people in the world are using.

You can have a platform that gives you each one via different but each widely used paths. What you can't have is a store that curates the long tail.