I 100% agree with everything you and jessep have said here.
I don't think Apple really cares if developers are happy, nor do I believe this is by accident that prices are being driven down in the Apple App Store or the Play Store.
I believe both Apple and Google are happy to see the number of apps go up and prices go down since this results in a large number of cheap complimentary products to the phones and tablets in the case of Play Store and App Store, as well as to Macs in the App Store.
It seems like they are taking this straight out of micro economics 101.
Price of complementary product A (apps in this case) go down leads to increased demand for product B (iPhone, Mac, Android Phone, etc... here).
This is totally unsustainable for developers and leads to the majority of developers in the App Store failing, and hence the opt-outs we see from developers on the Mac app store returning to the old way of selling from their website directly and other channels.
From the Mac perspective this seems to mean low quality apps and sell once no upgrade apps (games for example) stay in the App store and enterprise or high quality applications continue using the old model of sales.
I don't think that is ideal, but at least there is a way for developers to continue to sell their products and so high quality products will continue to be produced.
I'm much more concerned with the long term viability of the App & Play stores in regards to phones & tablets. As developers we have no real alternatives to sell our apps outside of the Google/Apple designated marketplace. So I have serious concerns about high quality applications continuing to be realized unless something changes as over time the up front cost and risk to create new software just continues to get worse.
I don't think Apple really cares if developers are happy, nor do I believe this is by accident that prices are being driven down in the Apple App Store or the Play Store.
I believe both Apple and Google are happy to see the number of apps go up and prices go down since this results in a large number of cheap complimentary products to the phones and tablets in the case of Play Store and App Store, as well as to Macs in the App Store.
It seems like they are taking this straight out of micro economics 101.
Price of complementary product A (apps in this case) go down leads to increased demand for product B (iPhone, Mac, Android Phone, etc... here).
This is totally unsustainable for developers and leads to the majority of developers in the App Store failing, and hence the opt-outs we see from developers on the Mac app store returning to the old way of selling from their website directly and other channels.
From the Mac perspective this seems to mean low quality apps and sell once no upgrade apps (games for example) stay in the App store and enterprise or high quality applications continue using the old model of sales.
I don't think that is ideal, but at least there is a way for developers to continue to sell their products and so high quality products will continue to be produced.
I'm much more concerned with the long term viability of the App & Play stores in regards to phones & tablets. As developers we have no real alternatives to sell our apps outside of the Google/Apple designated marketplace. So I have serious concerns about high quality applications continuing to be realized unless something changes as over time the up front cost and risk to create new software just continues to get worse.