I’m not an Apple dev, but their app store is around 60% of global market share for apps and I don’t fault people for choosing food on the table over platform ideology. I’m also not interested in this zero empathy game of “you should have known better” when the power imbalance is this severe. I lay the fault at the feet of Apple, where it belongs.
Tangentially, I think the tech community needs to be prepared to examine its assumptions about how much control large companies should have over their platforms as they start to resemble utilities. We can’t keep pretending that a duopoly represents real market choice.
IMHO, there's a difference between 'Platform companies squeeze as much revenue as they can by controlling their developers' and 'I can't believe Apple would do this!' The latter gets annoying.
Apple has always been just as cutthroat of a business as anyone else, albeit with a different model (hardware) and better branding/PR.
But see how much difference the hardware model makes when the market's down for a bit and Apple needs to juice revenue...
> I’m not an Apple dev, but their app store is around 60% of global market share for apps and I don’t fault people for choosing food on the table over platform ideology.
I don't either, but if that's the decision, then where do people come off thinking that they're owed something for participating in a market that they never had a controlling share of in the first place? That's what I don't get. I don't judge people for wanting to put food on the table, but don't act like you're then owed goodwill or whatever for making the rich people richer if that's the way you truly see it. You're supporting capitalism upfront and expecting some sort of vague socialism on the back end. How many times are people gonna get disappointed before they realize that big corporations don't care about them and never have?
I don't get your questions. People have realized this, and many other things, just fine.
It's not like realization is a magic reality bending power however. You can both (a) realize big incumbents are not fair and (b) still have no choice but to go them if you want to make money from your app.
Tangentially, I think the tech community needs to be prepared to examine its assumptions about how much control large companies should have over their platforms as they start to resemble utilities. We can’t keep pretending that a duopoly represents real market choice.