Maybe some people don't know, or have forgotten that Apple was dead set against an App Store, or third party apps when the iPhone came out. It only relented after it was jailbroken so many times. Apple's view was it would be a closed phone of apps how they said so.
Perhaps some of that mindset moved to the respective App Stores. User's don't have as much choice as people think.
The new App Stores being regulated in the EU are interesting for that reason.
Still reading about phones like WebOS on Palm that was maybe a year too late, could be a different world if we had a phone running JS as front end and for apps like it did.
Getting a walled garden up as quickly as possible was critically important.
When most apps cost $1 in total, paying 30 cents for all that was probably good value. Now that many high-end apps cost more than $100/yr, paying >100x more for the same service is not good value.
I was using Kagi (the now-defunct store/payment API provider whose domain name later got bought by the search engine) at the time, and Kagi worked out at around that percentage for me* — though at the time, hosting and bandwidth was also a significant cost on top of that.
And this weekend, I'm starting to convert some of my old Mac (PPC era Java) shareware into web games so I can play them again. No ads, no cookies, hosted for free (for now) on github. I tried it out on my iPad, which didn't exist as a product when I wrote the original, and turns out this is fine.
* I can't be bothered to dig out the archive link for the pricing to figure out the exact percentage, there was both a fixed fee per transaction and a percentage fee that varied by payment method.
Perhaps some of that mindset moved to the respective App Stores. User's don't have as much choice as people think.
The new App Stores being regulated in the EU are interesting for that reason.
Still reading about phones like WebOS on Palm that was maybe a year too late, could be a different world if we had a phone running JS as front end and for apps like it did.
Getting a walled garden up as quickly as possible was critically important.