[brandon272]

What stores take 30% lifetime subscription royalties for products sold on their shelves?

Can you imagine if Best Buy required Apple to add "Best Buy Payments" to MacOS so that Best Buy could collect a 30% fee on top of any services subscription that Apple sells to that MacBook user? All for the privilege of selling their products through the BB stores.

Apple isn't marking up a product for resale in it's retail environments. It is, in many cases, forcing its developers (who provide their valuable products to Apple for free, after paying Apple an annual fee) to completely rearrange their business models in order for Apple to collect a huge portion of their revenues, entirely on their terms.

[ilikehurdles]

It doesn’t matter. These are the terms of the store. If Walmart makes clear an expectation that you have to have an office in Arkansas in order to sell an item in their store, then you shouldn’t be surprised when your item is rejected from their store if you don’t build that office. There’s no expectation that you’d have free placement, certainly.

As for your Best Buy example, Best Buy can make that demand, but Best Buy would lose more from not having Apple’s products than Apple would from not being placed on Best Buy’s shelves.

[brandon272]

I agree completely - Apple can have whatever terms it wants within the bounds of the law. And app developers have every right to complain about those terms, loudly and in a sustained fashion, if they wish.

The second part there is what a lot of people seem to have difficulty accepting.

[chipotle_coyote]

Companies have certainly complained, loudly and in a sustained fashion, about dealing with certain brick-and-mortar stores over the years.

(Apple is in a frustratingly unique position compared to Walmart, Target, Best Buy, et. al., of course, in that the App Store is the way to get applications onto iPhones.)

[jpttsn]

It’s easy to accept that you have a right to complain. But after ten years of perfect clarify about how Apple intends to play this, your supposed outrage that the iPhone is still a walled garden seems willfully thick.

I’d be so impressed if one of you would just head over to Android and make a non-iPhone app that took the world by storm. Prove to us all that the 30% is a bad bargain, that Apple needs to change, that your software is valuable even without their store.

I guess it’s disheartening to see instead just another set of entitled complaints and dubious concern over end users, most of whom have no idea your $10 app exists and never thought about it when buying their $1000 phone.

[Wowfunhappy]

I was complaining ten years ago too. Time doesn't make problems magically go away.

But, it's also becoming more and more critical as phones take an increasingly central roll in our lives.