[billy99k]

The lesson here is that building your entire business on someone else's platform (like the IOS store) is too risky. They have full control over your business and can make one decision to ruin it in a single day.

Amazon ruined my business around 13 years ago. They kept $30K of my money for 6 months and it forced me to shut the business down. The worst part about it is that there was no real appeals process. I was redirected to either an automated response or another department that never responded to calls or emails.

Sure, you can take them to court. But this will bankrupt most people in lawyer fees.

This ended up being a good thing. This experience forced me into a new space, and I had a much more successful business for many years after.

[SoftTalker]

This sort of thing is probably a lot less surprising to businesspeople than software developers. Developers may think the world works like a computer, and that business contracts and agreements are like computer code. Businesspeople know that a contract is only as good as your ability to hold the other party to its terms. There may be deviations from what was agreed to, and you might just accept it or you might try to fight it but (a) that will cost you money and (b) nobody is going to give you that money up front. And there are extra risks when one party is a lot bigger/wealthier and/or a monopoly.

[Etheryte]

In addition to this, the post is a good highlight that just because you succeed once, doesn't mean you've figured it out. Apps are an extremely hit or miss space to build businesses in, and you can have great successes followed by absolute failures and everything in between. Apps are a part of the attention economy and they live and die by the power of random happenstance on the internet.

[kiba]

What do you do if you build a youtube channel? Can't exactly take the algorithms with you. There are mitigating steps you can take, such as building your own mailing list, but that pale in comparison even though people probably be doing that.

[mdorazio]

A fair number of YouTube content creators are diversifying onto other platforms to de-risk. Nebula seems to be a popular destination at the moment.