Developers revolt over Apple's new app store rules

Yes it is. Look at Visa and MasterCard. Even if there was no anti competitive practices (which I don't know), we wouldn't want them to take 6% of every retail transaction. So the EU set a limit, I think 0.5%.

Otherwise, the rentier corporations would extract a lot of wealth from the economy, instead of the productive class (like manufacturing, services, farming, etc).

However, regardless of fairness or sloppyness, if a large part of society feels the law should be interpreted in a certain way, the fact that it does not literally say that may be irrelevant. Who is going to reprimand the judges if the legislative, the government, the people, the local corporations all feel Apple should be kneecapped?

Did the constitution of the USA not literally say "all men are created equal" while you still had slavery?

I said no such thing. I said, by implication, that losing a year's revenue, but still having a functioning company, is better than being forced into bankruptcy.

Also, that in no way means that causing a third party app developer to lose a year's revenue is not a bad thing to do. Of course it is.

However, in both cases, the root cause is that the owner of the platform wants to run their platform in a way that third party devs don't like. And ultimately, unless the users of the platform care enough to force the platform owner to change, third party devs are simply going to be out of luck. It sucks, but that's the fact. Third party Windows apps today are for things that MS doesn't care enough about to implement themselves, because Windows users don't care that third party devs get a raw deal. Third party iOS apps are going to end up the same way, unless iOS users start to care about the sucky position third party devs are in. Which, as far as I can tell, they don't.

Apple's walled garden can more easily force you into bankruptcy though since you have no alternative way to distribute iOS apps to customers, therefore your revenue stream can be cut off without warning. Just because that one dev in that example didn't go bankrupt, doesn't prove your argument.

Meanwhile, Microsoft can't stop you from distributing apps on Windows, even though you're clawing to some made up strawman that they can make you bankrupt. You can still sell your apps just fine on your own website and people can easily pay you, download it and install it without Microsoft's permission since you can do whatever you want with that os, just like on MacOS.

I have no idea how you can argue the latter app distribution model is worse than the walled garden one, just through two anecdotal examples.

At the core of property ownership lies the right of exclusion – the ability to exclude or include something on one's personal property. This right is quite important and can even be used to derive most other property rights; please see the linked paper at the bottom. However, Apple's policies with iDevices violate this fundamental right by controlling what software can run on the device, even before someones does anything with their device they bought. They do this not via legal means but by using cryptography to reserve the right of exclusion for themselves (they claim its for your security though...). Part of the problem is when someone sells something that in most cases that means a complete transfer of all property rights to the buyer, but Apple is preventing that via extralegal means.

Consider this scenario: you purchase a new iPhone with the intention of not even using iOS and installing something like Linux. However, Apple's control over the boot-ROM prevents the hardware from booting any unsigned code without even opening the box. This gives Apple the ability to exclude or allow software to run on a device they no longer own. The thing is, Apple legally does not have the right of exclusion, but only reserves it via cryptography. This effectively restricts the exercise of your own property rights since you no longer can fully choose what to include or exclude from execution on that ARM processor you own. The fact that this control persists post-sale demonstrates a blatant infringement on individual property rights from Apple.

In summary, Apple is intruding upon individuals' personal property rights, notably the right of exclusion. Through the use of cryptography after purchase, Apple retains the right of exclusion which lets them determine which software can and can not operate on a device they no longer own.

For a more in-depth exploration of the right of exclusion, I highly recommend reading the paper titled "Property and the Right to Exclude" [https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/33139498.pdf].