[seanmcdirmid]

My point was that barriers don't matter much when you have a healthy market to receive your app. So while we might work on lowering barriers, its all for not if the store is a ghost town. This is very humbling to us PL/tools researchers.

What keeps you working on Apple's platform is the popularity of the app store, if you couldn't get customers; you would leave in a heart beat for a platform that had a healthier market. Look at all the people who learned Objective C...not because it was the best language, but because it was a technical barrier that was necessary to overcome to access a healthy market (and technical barriers are much easier to overcome than market barriers!).