When you buy apple related products to develop for their mobile platform you are buying the tool chain required to develop for that platform. This is very much different when compared to purchasing sofware for the servers for back end development and deployment. Its like you purchase the iOS toolchain(hardware and software) and sell the app to the user. The user purchases is own iPhone and runs that on it. You don't buy iPhones for the users do you?
As far as backend development is concerned. You have to buy the tool chain as well as the software(read OS, SQL Server, IIS etc etc) for the servers that your developed software runs on. Now the problem comes when you need scalability. Adding more servers to your stack means not just spending money on hardware but on the software stack as well.
So now it all boils down to buying real large and powerful servers since scaling out is not cheap. This has added risks like on issues like replication, back up etc etc.
No one wants to be caught up in this sort of a situation. Especially start ups.
As far as backend development is concerned. You have to buy the tool chain as well as the software(read OS, SQL Server, IIS etc etc) for the servers that your developed software runs on. Now the problem comes when you need scalability. Adding more servers to your stack means not just spending money on hardware but on the software stack as well.
So now it all boils down to buying real large and powerful servers since scaling out is not cheap. This has added risks like on issues like replication, back up etc etc.
No one wants to be caught up in this sort of a situation. Especially start ups.