I can't find it at the moment. If you can then do read it
He speaks to points very similar to what you are saying
Every free market with infinite/near infinite competition goes the same way
It's happening in games and books also
One of the things that happens is that a lot of these ecosystems attract young entrepreneurs who, devoid of business experience, jump in head first and give it all they got. They see accidental success stories like Flappy Bird and think "If I can do 1/10 of that I'm set". Three years later they are alive to regret the opportunity cost they wasted on that decision.
I am going to say that in business you have to be quite sanguine. Not always, of course, but the world and your competitors want to eat you alive, and if you walk into one of these arenas unprepared you are going to get used, abused and tossed out.
I don't want to be negative on Apple but I would sure like to know the numbers on the millions of developers who contributed massive amounts of time to the growth of this platform with free apps of all kinds that didn't even buy a daily loaf of bread for them. While developers were enjoying their get-rich-quick scheme, Apple piled billions of dollars (I lost track, $100 BN, $200 BN, more?) by selling hardware on the strength of a platform made useful by millions of free apps that nobody made any money on.
In a nutshell, I don't really like it when folks get used and discarded --which is precisely how I see what Apple did. They controlled the platform. They could have setup a win-win. They did not.
30% of nothing is nothing. Seriously, for a large number of developers the App Store is a big pile of nothingness.
Apple accelerated a race to the unprofitable bottom rather than to create a bottom that could actually deliver a financial return for developers. I mean, they could have established a $1 minimum price for apps, rather than $0. They could have created minimum business models that would deliver benefits to both developers and users. They chose to got to zero because a bunch of developers killing themselves to fill the app store with apps is good for Apple and users and developers are a dime a dozen (or at least that's the level of importance Apple seems to assign to them).
App discovery has sucked for years, which means that having an app found and noticed requires either luck, a tremendous amount of external marketing, a very large pile of cash or all of the above.
We've had apps on the App Store, about a dozen of them, it was a big waste of time and resources. Still, I am not holding that against Apple, they provided everyone with opportunities and many benefited from this greatly.
That said, I think they could have done a far better job of preventing the ecosystem from becoming a race to the bottom. This is where the optimization of the hardware sales vs. number of apps for free curve likely drove a decision that was not favorable for developers and entrepreneurs.
Early in the day we worked on an app for a client. Before they came to use they had already invested hundreds of thousands of dollars on the app. They needed a large rewrite due to Apple forcing code updates on everyone. This cost them a pile of cash. They made nothing with the app before engaging with us and still made nothing after we got done. They were in a segment dominated by the likes of Disney, who put millions of dollars into apps, gave them away for market share and, if that wasn't enough, poured real money into marketing.
This is where app discovery challenges and the race to the bottom truly hurt a lot of entrepreneurs. We abandoned all of our apps eventually. It just didn't make any sense to expend resources update code for zero return on investment.
I do think that 30% is high, yet that never really bothered me. I'd be glad to pay 30% if there was a real shot at app discovery and the entire ecosystem wasn't --using the term for dramatic emphasis-- tantamount to voluntary slavery for the benefit of Apple hardware sales. Sorry to be so negative, I imagine a wide deep path of entrepreneurial destruction created by Apple as a result of what the App Store devolved into. Apple sure made billions of dollars and lots of entrepreneurs did well. However, nobody ever gets a peek at what lies beneath the portion of the iceberg that protrudes through the surface. That portion, I am certain, is deep, wide and full of sad stories.
Put a different way: You can go sell products on Amazon for about the same 30% cut and have a FAR better chance of your products being found and making a profit.