This point is made frequently, and it's generally true. But, at the same time, every business is built on top of some kind of opportunity and there is no guarantee in life that opportunities are perpetual.

The mine runs out of ore. People stop buying records. The fish stop biting. The tax code changes. A foreign competitor appears with access to better resources. An invention instantly makes yours out of date. People stop eating out.

I don't think the answer is to avoid all possible opportunities that may not last forever. Instead, you just have to factor that into your business plan. That can mean diversifying, pivoting, or simply acknowledging that that particular business has run its course.

The App Store isn't a contract, but it is (or should be) quite a bit better than building your app on top of some open API that you have no assurances on, as the rules are published.

The problem is that there's no real introspection as to how the rules are applied, and not way to really appeal a decision and expect to influence the result, so the closest thing to a contract in this case is completely one sided.

Part of me wonders if the fact they charge for developer accounts means they might be liable in some way (although I'm sure this approach has been explored in the past), but Apple has deep enough pockets they could probably just refund every Developer the $99 and not bat an eye. If it affected the revenues they collected as their cut though... going after that money could really make a big dent if it was a class action (again, not sure this is even feasible under the law).

You do need to realize that this can change fairly quickly, so you should either use this as a springboard to something else, or just accept that it's a temporary business and not something that will stick around.

The concept still applies even if the problem isn't about being kicked out (which a contract could maybe solve), but simply about the market fading for one reason or another. One common thing that can happen is that the platform provider may decide to compete with you, which is often very hard to come back from - they usually have access to the platform in ways you can't replicate.

Perhaps this risk is not justified but that's a moral and legal issue not a business one.

The founders and dev team started a new company unrelated to apps. I tried my best to place our reviewers / curation team at other outlets. I had some success here, but it still pains me knowing that some of my previous team are still looking for something after all this time.

Seeing your response here has me appreciating your position in a way I didn’t above - given the circumstances and that you ultimately had to lay off your people I’m sorry for any offence caused. This must have been a rough time to work through.

The point I was making, and which I think is valid in any case, is that it’s simply not safe to build a business that’s reliant upon the whims of another company that has shown time and again that it’s policies will change with the wind.

Also, the web is still a wonderful platform with a bright future. Not least as PWAs aren’t subject to 30% taxes and subjective reviews!

The GP just didn't want to put in the effort to empathize with your struggle, so he tried to paint you as pathetic and stupid and therefore deserving of suffering.

>If anything, the lesson to be learned here is that if your business depends exclusively on another company for its survival then it’s not your business.

The problem is that these two ideas shouldn't coexist. If Apple does have monopoly powers then mobile app developers have no choice but to base their business's survival on the whims of Apple. Once a company reaches a near monopoly, both the laws and obligations regarding how that company must operate change.

This is standard behavior when talking to Apple. Since they're so incredibly editorial about what they permit on their platform, it behooves you to suck up as much as possible.

Source: have personally represented my previous tiny startup and Dropbox at Apple HQ. Have been pissing off Apple executives with my creations for more than a decade.

Honestly, I interpreted it differently, I saw someone passionate about something, respectfully addressing someone who’s extremely hard to get the attention, and succeeding at it! The problem being discussed is genuine, but I had a good feeling seeing Tim Cook asking his top executives to ponder about it.

The way the letter writer feels a need to keep on praising Apple and their vision and how everything]else is not worth anything make me nauseous.

Well, that's what makes his letter interesting. There are a hundred and one people who don't like your product. There are all the undecided people and non-promoter users who won't write you about things about your product. And then there are the super-fans.

You can win over the undecided and the non-promoter users, you have the super-fans, and it'll take a lot of work to get the people who don't like you to like you, so you spend your time on the first two categories.

Given that only the last two write you, and you don't care about the last, it makes sense for the super-fans to make it clear that they're super-fans. And if a super-fan is telling you you're making things hard for them, you care.

You mean people who drive revenue for you and people who don't. Emotions don't matter.

Only the people that find their way to the 'right' arguments are consistently welcomed - more than a few famous people in the community had to backpedal into saying Epic is just as bad because they want to make money off app sellers too, and not only that, they _entrapped_ Apple.

Daring Fireball plays a key role in what exactly 'Get It' means - ex. the nauseating amount of people saying all this is cool because something something Epic is a big corporation too.

> To the authors point - yes, Apple can change it’s policies whenever it likes, and can use those policies to kill other companies it views as competing with it’s own interests.

And in a world without antitrust regulation, a monopoly or cartel can use its market power to make massive profits and squash any and all competitors. Your "lesson" is one that takes the status quo as a given (in this case, the anti-competitive power of platforms), even when that status quo should be changed.

It's also far too extreme to be reasonable, since practically every small to medium business that depends on non-commodity inputs fails the test (for instance, pretty much every consumer software company, ever). I think the real lesson is that no business is every truly independent of others, and the platforms have discovered new classes of anti-competitive control that need to be legislated against.

I’m wondering if the solution is forcing the platform vendors to allow the device owners to “bless” an App Store in the way that they can permit individual sideloaded apps.

But this means it's nearly impossible to build a software business that's "your business". Do you really not see the problem with that?

The major platforms are iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows and the web. Of those, the web is theoretically open, except that the browsers are made by Apple and Google, and both of them drive change to the platforms based on their business strategy (Apple hobbling PWAs, for example.) Firefox exists, but with single-digit market share, and with a substantial portion of their budget evidently coming from Google, it's not clear how much of a force they really are.

This is why I think even though these platform are not technically monopolies, some kind of regulation or oversight is warranted. The economic value of the software world is too great to leave entirely to the whims of private companies.

It's only a question of when, not if, app stores will get regulated. And given very cocky attitude from Apple, regulations will be likely pretty strong.

Like with all new technology, laws take some time to catch up with specific of it, but the spirt of regulation is very well known. Giving too much power and tight grip over the competition, in increasingly important part of the economy is not something government will allow for single entity to posses. Apple, and few other tech companies, are on a highway to be new Standard Oil.

I'm iOS developer myself but currently making more investment to learn other tech stack (flutter, reactnative, qt).

iOS is definitely a huge market especially the biggest regarding revenue, but globally their marker share is being slowly eaten by android. If WeChat will get banned globally from app store their market share will fell drastically. Apple not gonna disappear anytime soon but worth to ask yourself how the future might look in 10 years. Especially if you are indie or small shop and cannot afford supporting multiple platforms natively.

What? I think the motivation behind the letter is pretty transparent -- trying to get the app back in the app store. Groveling is pretty consistent with that.

Were you thinking the motivation was something else? What motivation are you questioning?

Cool, but some of the world's largest companies evidently care enough about the platform to develop for it anyways–or feel the need to do so. When you have a party that controls access to such a large market, then telling people who develop for that platform that it's their fault that they decided to do that is basically victim-blaming.

The alternative to ownership is an absurdity like gmail can't block spam because "antitrust".

A lot of people and developers feel the same way about these technologies as the author. They are just opinions, and yours is obviously different, but I wouldn't say it is pitiful.

make a point... to whom? The guy selling? He's already selling. He gave in. What more do you want?

That is the point, they relied on one thing only too much. It seems a job of passion too.

That's easy to say now 10 years later, when you can look back at history.

But not equally obvious in the beginning when the app stores had just appeared.

Did you find this? I would be curious to listen

Was it the task-manager / parallel execution developer?