Oliver Reichenstein, founder of iA Writer, had this to say about his post on Apple and modern software monopolies:
This wasn’t easy to write it to publish. But, today, I just had to hit that publish button and get it over with. I have another hot potato post on subscriptions I’ve been juggling with for some time now. Some thoughts are sketched out in the monopoly post. I’ll drop that one soon, too. These topics are complex and dangerous. Writing about them publicly is simply terrifying.
For me, two highlights were:
Apple are not treating Netflix, Nintendo, and Spotify like iA Writer to be fair with us small devs. Think about it. Apple doesn’t profit much from taking 30% of iA Writer’s sales. It would cost them a smile to cut us off. And, given that from the hundreds of thousands of app, only very few reach our position, it wouldn’t be a big deal to cut us all loose. The benefit of having small passionate devs is not in the money they make from them. The benefit of having us is that we enrich the platform. For years, people have been telling us that they buy Apple gear because of iA Writer and similar apps. The benefit of cutting 30% from the small ones is that they can say “we treat everyone the same” and cut off a major chunk of the big Netflix, Spotify and Fortnite cakes.
and
Apple, a company with California Hippie roots that encourages to think different, has a developer community that is afraid to speak their mind in public.
The entire post is well worth reading. And whether you side with him and the $17.86 billion corporation or the $1.97 trillion corporation, you gotta admit it takes guts to lay out that argument on your company blog when the future of your business depends on the kind of day your next anonymous App Store reviewer is having.