Yeah, people seem to forget that when Apple announced the mobile app store with a $99 fee and 30% cut, developers were applauding. It was a radical change from the existing mobile development model and stores, and made it possible for many more developers.

The problem is that Apple never updated with the times. If they had simply done what one of the emails from the trial said (scale the fee back once the store was making 1B), then much of this could have been avoided.

> Somebody has absolutely no idea how high developer fees on proprietary platforms used to be.

Right. Even in the mass-market area, I remember when Microsoft used to charge seven or eight hundred bucks for Visual Studio.

Sure, in the past the computing era was different and tech corporates could get away with charging a lot for their development tools. But even then, you did not have to depend solely on them and there was a healthy competition in this vertical - Borland easily comes to mind. During the Java boom, their JBuilder used to be a top selling product till Eclipse came out. Open source and internet changed the game. Today Visual Studio also has a free version and even Apple is forced to offer their development tools for free because otherwise developers will prefer the free opensource options, than pay the exorbitant price they used to demand.

Weren't XBox development kits up around ten thousand dollars back in the days before the App Store changed the rules?

True. I don't have an idea of how high developer fees have been on proprietary, and restricted use platforms before. I have generally avoided them and grew up on mostly open platforms (Unix / Linux / Windows) before becoming a web application developer and moving on to mobile apps. My main point is that the computing environment is very different today and we should a fight such regressive practices - just because they have been doing something in the past, and can do it now at a larger scale too, doesn't mean we have to accept it and normalise it. Right?