I can't speak for you, but my family needs to eat.

Can I choose my opportunities? To some extent.

Yes of course, your family needs to eat and you need to eat. If you're most concerned with just making enough money to eat, you have a huge number of jobs available. If your app's failure vs. success is the difference between eating and not eating, you've made that decision consciously, knowing that you (necessarily) have the skills to get other jobs without such dire consequences.

The point I was making is that this rhetorical device of "I need to eat" is used way too often as a euphemism for "I want to make a lot of money". It's used that way because the former statement elicits sympathy and the latter statement attracts derision.

In the context of the original comment, the "need to eat" phrase was used in the context of an app developer. You don't create an app on the app store as a last ditch attempt to feed your family. You do it to make money, and you do it knowing the risk that it won't be successful and you won't make any money. Apple's inscrutable opaque approval process is another annoying risk on top of that, but whether you're going to eat shouldn't be a part of the equation here.

I was going to say something clever and snarky here, but then I realized that I am an "at will" employee for a single company that could ruin me financially with one arbitrary decision, and they would have no obligation whatsoever to justify it to me in any way.

At least Apple only takes ~1/3 of the value of the work you put into in the App Store.

It is not the case that all developers have easy access to abundant income. It is at least as wrong to assume that is true as to assume that they are living hand to mouth.

For those developers, it makes even less sense to pony up for a Macbook and an Apple Developer license and spend all their time on an app that's going into someone else's environment - especially someone who has a history of treating developers on their platform as second-class citizens.

They're told they'll make money. That is not only Apple's rhetoric but the press's.

It is fairly easy to assume that there are other routes to food than publishing apps in Apple's App Store. No one is guaranteed abundant income in general, never mind via some third-party business.

If a particular practice is acceptable for Apple, then it is presumptively okay for other software companies to do, too. And conversely, if everyone in the market for software-development labor wouldn't be allowed to do something, we shouldn't allow Apple to do it, either.

If a particular bit of conduct would be a poor idea if everyone were to do it, that's a pretty good idea it shouldn't be allowed at all.

Sorry, I don't understand how your conversation is relevant to the conversation.

Yes, developers have multiple opportunities, but often they don't choose what actually works. I did many things over my career, the only one that was truly successful financially was in a closed, proprietary environment. My open-source projects are all semi-failures. So where I spend my time is not my choice, it's my customers'.