It’s more like car manufacturer charging license fees to the dealership for their use of the original manuals and tools to provide services that rely on their diagnostic tools and manuals.
But a car is used for more things than going to the dealership, and the dealership does not sell me groceries. Perhaps I want to race, or carry ikea furniture, or jump start another car - it is a general-purpose transportation device.
Similarly, I dream of going to Epic's website to download some Fortnite, maybe charge a thousand vbucks to mom's credit card if I'm feeling adventurous, and that has nothing to do with Apple or iOS.
This is how every single general-purpose computing platform (including Apple's MacOs) and the open internet has worked for multiple decades.
we don’t care how the car is used. It’s the dealership that pays the fee on service manuals and access to tools, not the customer. The dealership can choose to pass the cost to customer but it doesn’t have to.
Oh but we do care. Not every app developer is a dealership, a car is used in a much broader context.
Some may be like Uber, turning the car into a taxi service, or like Turo, allowing it to be rented. Others may be independent mechanics that can work on the car perfectly fine without access to blessed tools.
There is no cost passed on to the customer because the car manufacturer does not enforce a percentage cut of Uber's or Turo's revenue.
That said, there is likely no perfect analogy in cars. We can instead turn to MacOs / Windows / Linux etc., general purpose computing platforms that do not suffer from a gatekeeper's stranglehold.
An independent dealership can choose to not service particular make of the car, pay for the OEM tools and license for manuals or can choose to obtain those via other means.
You can see where the lack of respect to IP rights leads to when it comes to current espionage claims between some of the world largest economies entangled in a myriad of IP disputes. Ultimately, the question I ask myself is: am I happy with unverified random parts I want to put in my car? Instead of having easy traceability and ability to sue for damages I now have to also vet provenance, authenticity and take on additional risk of an unvetted supplier that I often won’t be even able to sue.
The independent auto shop isn't paying the auto maker a fee every time they change the spark plugs on one of their cars though. They buy a license to the service manual collection and can use that knowledge for however many cars they work on.
This would be the developer buying a license to the SDK and documentation and then that would be it.
