Comment by scarface_74

That seems like a reversal of cause and effect.

Indie developers were (and to an extent still are) pretty important on computers. People made (still make) a living selling software for double-digit dollars direct to the customer, and many of them were very well known.

The App Store model provoked a race to the bottom because everything was centralized, there were rules about how your app could be purchased, and pricing went all the way down to a dollar. The old model of try-before-you-buy didn't work. People wouldn't spend $20 sight-unseen, especially when surrounded by apps with a 99 cent price tag. It's not so much that people don't care about indie developers as that indie developers had a very hard time making it in a space that didn't allow indie-friendly approaches to selling software.

No surprise that such a thing ended up in a situation where high-quality software doesn't sell, and most of the revenue comes from effectively gambling.

We say all of this on top of a mountain of open source software. This isn't about market love of "indie developers." It's the basic software economy we've known and understood for decades now.

It was 30% commission for the time frame we are discussing and an investment in hardware tools and desktop software on top of all that. It used it's own proprietary system which required additional effort to adapt to and increased your workload if you wanted to release on multiple platforms.

So users don't get to use their own device unless a corporation can smell money in creating that software for them? What a valueless proposition given everything we know about the realities of open source.

You've fallen into the same trap. This is a computer. There's nothing magic about it. The lens you view this through is artificially constrained and bizarrely removed from common experience.