I think the article misses the point.

If we transfer the app store experience over to the real world who would pay $4 for a cup of coffee at your shop if there were coffee stands on the sidewalk literally every 100 meters offering excellent free coffee for you to grab with some ads printed on the cup.

That's about the sort of competition that mobile app developers have to put up with. Starbucks however didn't have that competition when they started out, that's why they could become so big in the first place.