> It is rare to find someone who has paid a penny for anything else.

Citation needed. Who are all those people attending the Microsoft developers conference every year? Who were all the people in the audience for Ballmer's infamous "Developers, developers, developers" chant?

You're claiming the nonexistence of something that clearly exists.

> You have become incredibly insincere in your arguments, or you are seriously misunderstanding this discussion.

Please refrain from personal attacks.

As you noted in another comment, I'm primarily a Mac developer, and in my experience, the extent of the third-party Mac software market has often been vastly underestimated. Maybe it's just because people aren't familiar with it.

There are of course large numbers of users who never buy third-party software, but with any large platform, such as Mac or Windows, all it takes is a significant % of users to buy software for the market to really add up. Doesn't even have to be a majority of users.

I haven't been a regular Windows users for many years, but back when I was, there was a thriving consumer software market on Windows. Again, it doesn't even have to include the majority of users, because those who do buy software are willing to pay good money for it.

There's still a thriving market for Windows software.

There's even a quote from Bill Gates in which he dismisses someone (Facebook?) as a platform, because the amount of revenue they skim is usurious.

He specifically cites Windows as a platform model because they could have absorbed far more rent from their developers, but chose not to.

> That wasn't a personal attack whatsoever.

"You have become incredibly insincere in your arguments"

> Tiny, micro-boutiques that are a little sliver of marginal prosperity in a desolate wasteland of failure.

I would rephrase this to say you're talking about small businesses, which are not sexy or well known, but are both widespread and crucial to the entire economic foundation of the United States.

Unfortunately, App Store revenue is very top-heavy. A few big players, such as Epic, do extremely well on the App Store, but small businesses tend to suffer in the App Store. The total software revenue may be higher now, but the distribution of revenue matters a lot. If the rich get richer, and the rest are stagnant or get poorer, that's only good for the rich, and I wouldn't call it a healthy market, regardless of the totals.

In the App Store era, it's "easier" than before to become a wild success, like Epic. But it's a lot harder for indie developers to make a living. You can't "make it up in volume", and you don't have a huge marketing budget to get to the top of the App Store charts, so you need to charge sustainable prices for software. The App Store "race to the bottom", as well as other business and technical limitations, have really hurt smaller developers. I'm not sure we can, or want to live in a world with only BigCos.

I would also say, since you mentioned developers making internal corporate apps, that the App Store doesn't really help them at all, and in fact makes their life more difficult, especially on a locked down software platform such as iOS, where you have to jump through all of Apple's hoops just to get your software from one computer to another.

Remember how Apple temporarily shut down a lot of Facebook by revoking their enterprise certificate? We can quibble about whether Facebook "deserved" it, but why is internal software even subject to those restrictions in the first place. I certainly wouldn't call that "liberation".