[briandear]

> You're excluding people and organizations who want to maintain a single codebase.

Not my problem. Don’t shit on my user experience because what YOU want. Remember, I don’t need your product, but you need customers.

As far as ethical concerns about mandatory software purchases as a prerequisite— it’s not mandatory: you don’t have to develop for iOS. Make a website instead.

[dspillett]

> Remember, I don’t need your product, but you need customers.

Not all customers are desired. Some are enough of a hassle for support (both in developing for the idiosyncrasies of their platform and potentially dealing with the idiosyncrasies of their personalities) that they represent a cost rather than a profit.

This is why some are perfectly happy that Apple's policies effectively exclude Apple users from some of their output. It effectively means a bunch of self importants, who would complain that the moon is the wrong shade of grey if given it on a stick, are conveniently diverted away from bothering them. Unfortunately while Apple platforms seem to have more than their fair share, such self importants exist everywhere...

Similar arguments can be made for not supporting IE, particularly legacy IE: unless you are targeting certain industries (investment banks: I'm looking at you!) supporting users stuck on old browsers can be more time+hassle cost then they are worth.

[jsgo]

Is the person's app going to automatically end up on your device or did I miss something here?

If Apple's review board feels the app is trash, it will be rejected as such. And the original poster wanted to just do a website instead, but they also wanted audio to be playable in the background (which makes sense when you're making a for all intents and purposes radio app).

[saagarjha]

> If Apple's review board feels the app is trash, it will be rejected as such

Apple is not as strict here as you're supposing. While Apple's review guidelines do say that they reserve the right to reject apps during the review process if they're ugly or don't work well, in reality this is almost never the case.

[bartread]

> Remember, I don’t need your product, but you need customers.

This becomes much less compelling with apps built to be used within a large enterprise. At this point cost of development and maintenance become much more important, because you can always train your workforce to fudge their way around the suckass user-experience.

(Although, in principle, I agree with you and am generally not a fan of systems and products that sacrifice UX for developer expediency.)