Not having to worry about being a sysadmin for my phone gives me more freedom to do the things I actually want to do. As the Linux world and its permanent state of "it'll be ok next year" have demonstrated, you can't have it all. Freedom to mess with the innards of your system, or freedom to forget you're using a "system" and just do stuff with it. Pick one.
I doubt the apps will be as cheap in a situation where there's a single company monopoly.
At the moment, it is in Apple's interest to keep apps cheap, to drive sales of hardware, and adoption of their platform.
If they ever got a stranglehold on the market, however, it would be logical to increase the price of the Apps, up to the price people were willing to pay.
This is exactly what happened with Nintendo in the late 80s and early 90s. Nintendo took a cut of the sale of every cartridge - think it was around 30%
Video games became very expensive.
iOS is not Windows. It is much closer to the controlled channel that NES was.
Apple very much have the ability to narrow access to the walled garden, and increase prices, if they achieve such a monopoly that it becomes advantageous to do so.
Are they going to increase their cut? Doubt it. Why would they? Apps are not what makes them money: devices are - and they make a lot more money from having a healthy app ecosystem than they do from squeezing every penny out of developers.
Of course, Apple's ways are mysterious and unpredictable. But they have so far shown no interest in increasing their cut of app revenues. Much like iTunes, they're happy to leverage this huge library of "media" to boost sales of devices.
They could increase their cut. But they could also just increase the price per app, by reducing competition (e.g. only allowing 1 app of each sort). They would be incentivised to do this, to make more profit, obviously.
Seeing as games are being discussed, Nintendo used to do this by increasing the manufacturing cost they charged to make the cartridges (afair, Nintendo had a stranglehold on the cart manufacture), and hence you got situations like where Street Fighter 2 on the SNES was crazily priced - don't remember exactly, but something like £60 in the UK.
>Much like iTunes, they're happy to leverage this huge library of "media" to boost sales of devices.
If they had a device monopoly, they would no longer need the apps to be cheap to boost device sales, which is my point.
ESPECIALLY if the name of that corporation is Apple - doing its best to destroy customer and developer freedom while baiting everyone with aqua-glazed convenience.