at what point do people decide that the apple app store is not worth developing for? the early gold-rush days have passed, so there's not even the lure of making loads of money from a minimum-effort app, and from what i hear the store is now so crowded, and the search and sort tools so bad that even getting your app noticed is a struggle - so why continue to deal with apple's abusive hoops and requirements?
For Apple's App Store to become less appealing, you'd need at least a couple of the following to happen:
* Android App Store/Google Play becomes a viable business proposition
* Windows App Store becomes a viable business proposition
* Blackberry App Store becomes a viable business proposition
* The demographics of Apple device owners shift away from the current favorable, affluent, app-buying profile
* The app screening process gets easier, such that malware and other liability-causing software infests it the way that Google Play is infested (and remember, Apple and Disney are longtime buddies and Apple is working a lot harder for media companies' cooperation than Google is)
* The developer program entry barriers become something that bother serious coders already invested in the Apple ecosystem, as opposed to random grumpy developers on the Internet (it is rarely a good business move to treasure the opinion of people who aren't your customers and don't intend to become customers)
good points, especially the last one. i guess if you're already invested in the apple ecosystem ios development seems like a natural extension to mobile.
i was surprised to see you list the screening process as a plus though - that alone would be enough to make sure i never go anywhere near apple mobile dev. i can sees users being (justifiably!) nervous about malware, but as a developer the process looks onerous and capricious. (though again i suppose i mostly hear about it from disgruntled people)
The app screening and approval process has problems, sure, but they're dwarfed by the upside. Users think nothing of downloading and installing a new app on their iThing, and when they don't want they app, they delete it and it's gone for real. Contrast this to the Windows desktop that formed a lot of people's learning experiences, where a new app can fuck things up tremendously and where it's gratuitously hard to make sure that something is gone for real.
That trust that users have in the app ecosystem is, from Apple's point of view, a tremendously valuable asset, and so they are taking logical steps to preserve it. If they lose it, people stop buying apps, the virtuous circle goes to pot, and Apple is in deep trouble. Sure, being assholes about the app approval process has costs, and it's really annoying from the developer side - but from Apple's point of view, the cost of not being hardasses about the approval process, is absolutely ruinous.
