The article provides no evidence to support the conclusion that it's about Job's or Apple's trust of developers. It just recounts some history and then jumps to disjointed conclusion.

In fact, it has nothing to do with trust. I can predict with 100% certainty that developers will flock to popular platforms and mostly stay away from failed platforms.

In the platform business Jobs had failures (NeXT, Macintosh classic) and successes (Apple II, iPhone, iPad). His successful platforms had no problems attracting developers, his failed platforms less so.

The trust relation actually goes in the other direction: it's important that the developers trust the platform maker.

Platform providers have a symbiotic relation with their developers which creates a positive feedback loop: successful platform attracts developers which make useful programs which makes the platform even more successful etc.

At the same time platform providers invariably compete with developers on their platform. Nintendo competes with other game companies writing games for their consoles, Microsoft competes with some companies writing software for Windows and Apple competes with other companies writing software for Mac or iOS.

To me the core of the issue is: how fair is the game. Platform provider will always have technical and marketing advantage over independent developers. Nintendo programmers probably know the hardware the best and Nintendo can cross-promote their games with their console. At the same time we know it's not enough to win: there are games that, at a given time, sell better than Nintendo's games. Microsoft Money couldn't beat Quicken and the Windows software market is so huge that Microsoft is not even playing in most categories.

Apple did set up the game to be unfair and they are fully taking advantage of that to maximize profit.

As such, they've broken my trust and trust of many developers.

First, unlike Android or Microsoft, they set themselves up as a final arbiter of what kind of software is even allowed to run on iOS. When Microsoft was competing with Netscape, they actually had to write a better browser for Windows. Due to Apple rules (no interpreters allowed => no JavaScript allowed) you can't even write a competing browser for iOS which is why there's no FireFox for iOS or Chrome for iOS.

When they didn't like Google Voice app, they just banned from iOS (despite it not even violating any official rules). It allegedly took government (FCC) investigation to get it enabled.

But that wasn't enough: the new in-app payment rules target companies that have much bigger and comprehensive businesses that just writing iOS apps. Apple wants to interject themselves between any service that offers some kind of paid service and users using iOS devices and collect chunk of the revenue despite the fact that for many such businesses 30% is economically impossible.

Those are major violations of developer's trust on the part of Apple. I for one will not write a single line of iOS code as long as there is a viable alternative like Android.

Breaking developers' trust isn't enough to break the platform. If the platform is successful enough, most developers will just swallow the bitter pill.

However, if there's one thing that doesn't change it's this: things change. Apple is on top of the world right now but Android is gaining momentum. Apple's greed is a dangerous game: if the Android momentum continues, it'll be much easier for developers to walk away from Apple's platform into a welcoming embrace of Google.