Yeah, technically. But just everyone _normal_ just pays using Stripe often without even knowing about it. On the _walled garden_ all is so clear that my 70 years aunt is able to do it. And there is no exceptions to the rule: every subscription made through the App Store is there and it's cancellable...
30% is a robbery, and the confusion on the customer "ownership" is true, but it's not useful for the discussion to negate the advantage the _garden_ offers to the basic consumer
The "chrome" of an app is the part surrounding the main windows, like toolbars and the such.
IIRC when Chrome appeared, the name was chosen because it was a browser without chrome (ie: it used to be just the rendering windows with the url bar on top), differently from other browsers at the time.
Well, the point I was trying to make, said in another way is that the initial success of App Store (iOS, in particular) was driven that the fact that , suddenly, users thought that was OK to pay for the software. I think that the (relative) lack of piracy and difficulty for ordinary users to install pirated software has been a key factor in the success of it: "there's an app for that, and I can't easily find it for free".
The other point I was trying to make is that the disappearance of "stand-alone" apps, not tied to a web service, is primarily driven by the fact that, this way, you can avoid piracy. You can offer a free-tier (that would be eaten by the piracy anyway) and sell (say) a synchronize, or additional features tied to a web service (so not printable).
May be it's not the only thing, but that's what (anecdotically) I hear from solo-indie-very small developers.
I fully agree with you on both the current discoverability problem and also with games piracy having a different, may be even not negative effect.
Piracy is not-impactful is not true. The disappearance of indie software that do not depend on a remote server (or that's not software on a remote server) is basically due to the inability to monetize with sales native, stand-alone, software. And that's for the piracy.
In some way, the success of the App Store towards indie/solo developers is because there was a way to sell things without the piracy easily steal your sales.
Yes, I know that "it's not stealing", "it's not theft", etc. Beside the ethical/moral conundrum of piracy, the fact is that it destroys the market for small developers.