> > Pay software engineers on their payroll to help Spotify sell music on the iPod (oops; I mean iPhone)?
> Well, Microsoft did that, they developed the Spotify app for Windows Phone back in the day.
I was trying to be _too clever_ in my reference. What I was trying to say is that there's no moral highground for the developer community to stand on and demand that Apple reduce their commission or allow sideloading on the iPhone. A similar argument demanding that Apple open up iPods for 3rd party apps would've never sounded reasonable when Apple had the largest revenue share or market share or whatever share of the digital music player market. The exact same situation applies to the iPhone as well.
What Microsoft did was because they had no leverage. Apple beat them to market and successfully attracted enough developers to write apps. Sure Apple's platforms benefit from having 3P developers, but that doesn't mean they should set prices based on what 3P devs feel is "fair". If devs don't like the iPhone they should've developed for Windows Phone.
>I guess because such a large portion of phone users use iPhone, not developing for iOS means you remove yourself from competing about not only those customers but others as well. Say you develop a chat app (fat chance of that now but anyways), a large portion of Android users will say "It's nice and all but because some of my friends have iPhones I want to be able to chat with them as well."
> So quite simply, you need to be where the customers are and customers want native apps not web apps. They don't want to open Safari or Chrome or Firefox, type in a URL and some login credentials. It's too much of a nuisance. So if you don't write a native app some one else will and then they take all your customers...
Yes I completely agree with all these points. That is precisely what costs 30% of your app's revenue. The argument around "fairness" doesn't apply because the value provided by the platform is massive. It's the same reason why any argument comparing the iPhone to a Mac or PC wouldn't apply either. You can always build a web-app that's based on open standards and pay the price of losing to a competitor who will build a richer native app.
I'm a legal expert or something. As a developer myself, I find the arguments presented by the dev community against the App store & it's commission self-serving and hypocritical. That's just the cost of doing business on an iPhone. It's expensive! So the best thing to do is to go out there and build for every other phone maker.