Re:Why Amazon got out of the Apple App Store tax and other d...
by pdonis on Saturday April 04, 2020 @02:18PM
(#22780215)
> The thing with Apple though was there were good reasons to believe that their interests were strongly aligned with their users’ and by extension with indie developers.
There were good reasons at one time, yes, for the reasons you give.
But there aren't good reasons now, because circumstances have changed.
Something similar happened in the 1990s with Microsoft and Windows. In the early days of Windows, MS encouraged third-party developers to code to it, because it helped to speed up the expansion of the user base. All kinds of good third-party Windows apps sprung up and thrived for a while.
But once the market was pretty much saturated with Windows, a lot of those third-party developers discovered that they were now basically doing market research for MS: whenever they hit on a killer app or feature, MS would simply duplicate it, ship it as part of Windows, and destroy the third party dev's market.
There were good reasons at one time, yes, for the reasons you give.
But there aren't good reasons now, because circumstances have changed.
Something similar happened in the 1990s with Microsoft and Windows. In the early days of Windows, MS encouraged third-party developers to code to it, because it helped to speed up the expansion of the user base. All kinds of good third-party Windows apps sprung up and thrived for a while.
But once the market was pretty much saturated with Windows, a lot of those third-party developers discovered that they were now basically doing market research for MS: whenever they hit on a killer app or feature, MS would simply duplicate it, ship it as part of Windows, and destroy the third party dev's market.