> Apple doesn't develop those SDKs and tools in order to make money selling them to developers; Apple develops that stuff in order to sell iPhones.
Nobody buys an iPhone because of the SDK.
Nobody… except perhaps developers.
Apple makes those things so that developers make more apps for their phones, which they want to support in order that people continue to buy new phones.
> Apple charges 30% simply because they can, and nobody has stopped them.
Yes.
And unless the government says "the thing we don't like is specifically the price", what you're going to get from demanding side-loading and other app stores is going to look like the same price charged in a more complex way that's distributed differently over all the developers.
This also means that it's likely some app providers will suddenly discover their costs go up.
As a consumer, I'm fine with however this shakes out: I spend almost nothing on apps anyway, and the selection is too large for me to care about the size and diversity within the marketplace.
As an iOS app developer, I have no idea how any of these options may or may not affect the demand for my skills on the job market, but I still don't care much because GenAI is a much bigger change than all of these options combined.
As an investor, I've been expecting Apple to hit the upper limit for corporation size before monopoly lawsuits 2 trillion dollars of market cap ago, which is one reason why I bought S&P 500 instead of APPL (the other being I'd like my income and my investments to avoid too many correlated failures).
Nobody buys an iPhone because of the SDK.
Nobody… except perhaps developers.
Apple makes those things so that developers make more apps for their phones, which they want to support in order that people continue to buy new phones.
> Apple charges 30% simply because they can, and nobody has stopped them.
Yes.
And unless the government says "the thing we don't like is specifically the price", what you're going to get from demanding side-loading and other app stores is going to look like the same price charged in a more complex way that's distributed differently over all the developers.
This also means that it's likely some app providers will suddenly discover their costs go up.
As a consumer, I'm fine with however this shakes out: I spend almost nothing on apps anyway, and the selection is too large for me to care about the size and diversity within the marketplace.
As an iOS app developer, I have no idea how any of these options may or may not affect the demand for my skills on the job market, but I still don't care much because GenAI is a much bigger change than all of these options combined.
As an investor, I've been expecting Apple to hit the upper limit for corporation size before monopoly lawsuits 2 trillion dollars of market cap ago, which is one reason why I bought S&P 500 instead of APPL (the other being I'd like my income and my investments to avoid too many correlated failures).