I'm good friends with a guy who makes about half his income on an iPhone app he created. With all the changes Apple and these other companies like Twitter and Facebook on their open developer platforms, a lot of developers are starting or gonna start to feel the pinch as the bigger businesses begin to consolidate services and take away opportunity.
I for one believe in going to the gold rush that developer access has brought in application builds. But that's just what it is - a gold rush! What does a gold rush do? It ends eventually.
My biggest gripe over the people complaining about terms changes or whatnot is the fact that they created businesses solely on the back of other businesses. They completely disregard the business to which they are practically being parasitic. Sure, it's symbiotic at first. In return for the traffic each brings to the other, the app will most likely make money. But now, as the host business (i.e. Apple, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) wants to build revenue, they want to take back features built by third parties.
Kudos to them. Facebook alone allowed 500,000 developers to create 100s of thousands of apps to test effectiveness of a platform. Notice how many are still standing tall. Still get those FarmVille invites? Yeah, a single app on Facebook is bigger than all of Twitter! And valued at 3x Twitter!!
What Facebook did is allowed developers to make money in a gold rush. Now they will be merciless in their world domination by taking the strengths of all the successful applications (they are creating their own credit-based ecosystem just like FarmVille has for offers) while having the developers spend the millions of dollars they would have on testing. Talk about a R&D WIN.
THEY OWE THE DEVELOPERS NOTHING. Sure, through your channels you help spread the their service, but you've made your pay. Now it's their turn.
Twitter is rolling out Promoted Tweets. They bought Tweetie. Eventually they will take all the biggest third party features and either buy them or build them from within leaving the developer SOL. Same with Apple. They can accept or reject what they want. They created a way for YOU to make money. Without their platform, you wouldn't have had that opportunity.
I mean, my biggest question to the developers is did you not see this coming?
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