| The risk always is there, but I don’t think you can blame large OS seller for it. OS sellers also compete with other OS sellers, and have to keep adding features, or customers will stop buying their product. For example: back in the 1970s, to draw bitmapped graphics, you used to have to buy a graphics drawing library, for a few hundred dollars. It likely shipped with fonts that you couldn’t use in a text processor that you had to buy from another vendor. The market for such products is a lot smaller today. If you call any ‘adding a feature that you can buy from a third party’ Sherlocking, OS sellers cannot avoid being criticized: - if they don’t add a feature, critics will say “why can’t their OS do FOO? You get that for free with Acme’s OS ” - if they implement it in a basic way, they’ll say “their FOO can’t BAR” - if they implement a competitive product they’ll say “Sherlocking” ⇒ I would limit “Sherlocking” to “largely the same feature with largely the same UI, and that UI isn’t obvious” |
If, as a developer, I knew I only had a couple of years at best before Apple replicates my app, would there be any incentive for me to create the app and pay Apple the $99 yearly fee?
The Apple App Store is a lot like a shopping mall with Apple as the landlord. Imagine you rented a spot from Apple in the mall to sell your products. Then, Apple, afraid of being left behind, starts creating the same exact shop next to you, selling the exact same products cheaper since it owns the mall. This would cause you to lose customers and eventually close down.
If this trend continues, there could come a point where every app is replicated by Apple.
These app owners would go out of business, and the App Store would become nothing but a catalog of Apple apps and other apps created by Microsoft, Facebook, and the like.
Is that good for the indie developers at the end ?
I can foresee a world where the indie software developer doesn't exist because the platform owners are essentially offering their products for free.
How about the customer ?
As Apple isn't obligated to provide anything good in terms of software, just a free alternative that's baked into the OS, would that even matter in the end?