Re: Epic Greed
"I do think they should receive some sort of recompense considering they host the app, distribute the updates, provide the APIs, development tools, etc. They are a business and not a charity after all."
Those things have minor if any justifications. There are two different ones there.
"host the app, distribute the updates": These two are basically the same--that they provide some bandwidth to download the app packages. Which is a fair point, but A) that costs very little at their scale and B) Epic wanted to host their own store and spare Apple the expense. Since Apple refused to let that happen, it ends up sounding like "They must pay for the thing we force them to use", which is a lot less defensible.
"provide the APIs, development tools, etc.": They write the OS, and software runs on it. They benefit tremendously from this; if there were no apps other than the ones they write, then many people wouldn't buy their hardware. Like other operating systems, their investment in encouraging developers helps them a lot. They can also choose to make tools which they charge for, and they chose not to. This asks the developers to pay for something they didn't choose to make and may not have chosen to use. App developers are businesses, not bank accounts for Apple's development teams.
I have heard frequently how Apple is owed gratitude in the form of cash from developers who get to users on Apple's platform, despite the fact that the users would be on someone else's platform if Apple didn't have those developers. In my opinion, you could make an equally cogent argument that Apple owes developers of popular apps for their users and should be paying them a cut of their tremendously profitable hardware sales. It makes just as much sense.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
