McDonald's buys soda and resells it to customers. Apple does not buy apps and resell them to customers.

The current situation in the iOS ecosystem would be more like McDonald's forbidding you from bringing your own beverages into their restaurants, even if they don't sell the same beverage (or even a competitor of one they do sell) and you plan to buy their food.

Of course, restaurants can and do frown upon or even outright forbid the above behavior, but they also don't charge multiple hundreds of dollars for you to walk through the door.

Sounds like a bad analogy - Apple does buy the app for 70% of what they sell it.

I wouldn't really call that "buying". If Coca Cola operated by setting up shop inside a McDonald's and selling its soda, but had to give 30% of its earnings to McDonald's, most people wouldn't say that McDonald's buys the soda. I guess it could be interpreted that way, but it'd be a very weird way of doing so, and would be (IMO) an incorrect interpretation of the semantic relationship between the soda manufacturer and the restaurant.

To further demonstrate that semantic disconnect, the app developer is only paid when Apple receives a payment from the user for that app. Modeled in terms of McDonald's selling soda, it would be equivalent to McDonald's not paying Coca Cola until someone orders and pays for a fountain drink. AFAIK, this ain't the case.

In other words:

* McDonald's actually buys soda from Coca Cola, then resells it to customers

* Apple only facilitates the transfer of money (from user to developer) and application (from developer to user)

If anything, Apple is probably closer to an escrow than a retailer (another bad analogy, I know, but certainly better than any notion of Apple buying and reselling apps).