Apple paid $35B to developers last year.

It pays around $12B a year to shareholders, which today comprise a large percentage of the US population.

It has 137,000 employees making an average comp north of $200,000 a year.

It’s the world leader in consumer computer products and leads its markets in customer satisfaction measures.

What is this not much else you speak of?

> Apple paid $35B to developers last year.

Paid is very strange term to use to describe it. They sold 3rd party software to users, while taking 30% cut.

They hosted, vetted, distributed public, provided support and developer services including a single easy to use and safe purchase system that built that market over a decade. They have been so successful that iOS developers make nine times as Android developers per device solid.

Walmart build, vetted, distributed and provided support to Procter & Gamble products over many decades. But saying that Walmart is paying to Procter & Gamble would be also gross mischaracterization.

Appstore model is as old as civilization - middle man reselling stuff. Some middle mans are more effective than others, and true, Apple is one of them. But that doesn't change characterization of the relationship. They don't pay developers for their service, they resell their stuff, while keeping hefty profit margins.

Grocery stores were an enormous business before Walmart, it just made them more efficient. And it opened doors for lots of smaller products to reach far more customers.

The entire mobile app market was not even one hundredth the size of the App Store before it was created.

The walled garden Apple created made safest and easiest app purchase environment ever, which is why it attracts the highest spending by app customers and highest spending app customers.

If Apple had taken the Google play route that $35B a year would be closer to $4B a year.

> per device solid.

Why is this always added as if it's relevant? If I'm selling an app on both stores I care about how much money I can make in total, how many Android phones have been sold globally is just trivia.

Because it directly reflects how successful the walled garden Apple has built is for developers. It’s attracted great customers, and made them feel very safe and comfortable with purchasing apps.

If you don’t like the ratio, just say App Store sales are 50% higher than Android.

That $35B didn’t exist until Apple created the iPhone and built its walled garden.

"Pandering to Apple" on the matter of whether your messaging is free and colored blue or green? As opposed to the fundamental moral question of how families and children treat each other in poisonous, classist ways?

Next we'll say that accepting Nike's swoosh is pandering to Nike, and look at all the poisonous affects Nike's swoosh is having on kids with no-brand shoes.

Not much else? Other than consistently building some of the best consumer tech products in history that are widely used and loved as evidenced by this thread?

Don’t buy Apple products?

But then what about capitalism and muh free market? obviously /s

We shouldn't. Buying Apple products is not mandatory.

Also, apologies for getting a bit political, but I came from a country that got screwed up for 100 years because a small group of people who loved "corporation making a few people wealthy beyond all imagination" language got into power in 1917, so I'm quite sensitive to it, so what if instead we say:

"a group of 47,000 Americans who make anyone a little bit wealthier if they buy a bit of AAPL"?

We call them public companies for a reason

Regulating monopolies is not full communism. One of the problems with soviet immigrants like yourself is the tendency to have extremist radical capitalist views, the most famous example being Ayn Rand. But history has shown extreme unregulated capitalism doesn't work either, the best system is a well regulated capitalism with democratic oversight of the regulators.