> The thing is, if Apple alienates developers enough/makes them go bankrupt, the only applications you will be able to use would be the first party Apple ones. That won't be a very enjoyable thing, would be?

I doubt this is a popular opinion, but I'd rather use an iPhone right now with no third-party apps than an Android phone. I do use a few third-party apps on my iPhone, and I would miss them, but it wouldn't be enough to switch to Android.

> If a shopping mall was charging every store 30% of their revenue (not profit, revenue!), it would be very quickly going broke and empty. Yet Apple (and to a lesser degree Google, Facebook and a few others) is getting away with this - exactly because unlike the shopping mall, the developers don't have a choice. It is either play by Apple rules - or be excluded from a very sizeable part of the mobile market.

Would your opinion change if this shopping mall was one of many shopping areas in a large region, but its customers were vastly more likely to spend money, while the other shopping areas attracted mostly customers who walked around but didn't purchase much? Isn't that the analogy with Android, which is a very obvious alternative for both smartphone customers and developers? The only rebuttal I'm seeing is from developers complaining that Android users don't like to spend money on apps.