And developers have been bending over with beaming smiles on their faces for just as long.

Apple's behavior might change if the developers keeping it alive left for other ecosystems in sizable enough numbers. Unfortunately, that has yet to happen in the mobile space, so Apple continues to have no problem shafting mobile devs (the desktop space is a different story, however, since Apple is not dominant there except for very specific market segments, like hipster Ruby programmers and/or art students).

The interesting thing is why they keep on doing it, and why the developers keep on letting them.

Yeah, creating all this multi-billion dollar app market and all, what a shafting...

>Without apps, Apple has nothing.

Actually Apple managed to make the iPod a huge success, and the iPhone for the first year too, without any apps. They built a market of billions without any apps. Only then did apps appeared with the first SDK.

Nobody is making money selling phones that don't have apps. Apps are 100% necessary for a smartphone to survive.

Apple simply could not have a successful mobile platform without apps.

>Nobody is making money selling phones that don't have apps. Apps are 100% necessary for a smartphone to survive.

Now yes. In the start not.

Nobody is making money selling PCs without apps either. Are desktop app programmers demanding a pay cut from PC sales?

I was being facetious about getting 30% from Apple.

My point is, that they are and always have been assholes to devs, who they need.

I don't know, as a dev I like their APIs, tooling, market access and efforts to improve their environment (ObjC 2, now Swift) very much, thank you.

A sense of entitlement always fascinates me. Yours isn't as much fun as the variety you can find reading gaming forums, but it's still making me smile. Thank you!

I think of the dolts who vote for EA as "Worst Company" when EA is nothing like Comcast or Time Warner Cable or even Seaworld or Monsanto.

Commoditise your compliments: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html