Astropad undermines their own argument by pointing out that Apple forced them to change their business plan by adding features to their product they otherwise wouldn’t have.

One of my first jobs was at a coffee shop, owned by a guy who once tried to expand his coffee shop to other locations, only to see Starbucks snatch those locations from his fingertips at the last second by walking in and offering the landlord a lot more money. He never did expand, and actually he just went out of business in part due to this government mandated economic shutdown, but he was old enough to retire so I wouldn’t cry for him, he’s got his wife and health and plenty of time to enjoy his retirement. I digress. The guy who owned the coffee shop knew the real estate fellow at Starbucks who would walk in and offer these last minute deals. He would always tell him, “it’s just business.”

Apart from walking in and taking the prime pickings of the potential retail spots to open a coffee shop, Starbucks had another much more well known practice of opening up shop across the street or right next door to other coffee shops. Now what would happen really depended on what how the coffee was like at the indie.

Starbucks would actually drive up interest in the area for coffee, so if your small indie coffee shop served good coffee, then Starbucks opening up next door might be the best thing to ever happen to you. Sales would go up, more people in the neighborhood would start drinking coffee increasing your possible pool of customers.

If your coffee sucked though, then you were probably going out of business. Your customers would try the Starbucks coffee, find it was better than you served and the writing would be on the wall. People would still come by and try your coffee, but if it wasn’t as good, they wouldn’t be back.

Software isn’t special. You can break your back putting your all into a product that people love and get a lot of value out of, but you’re not entitled to success just because you worked hard, and you aren’t entitled to go without competition, even from the platform vendor. When you find yourself at odds with the platform vendor, then you go multi-platform, you change, you adapt.

I bought my phone and iPad knowing their limitations, and I was okay with them. Every one of those developers I see in the App Store chose to be there, and if they weren’t there, somebody else would be. The App Store created the opportunity for small indies like Marco Arment to build sustainable businesses on, and for services like Spotify to reach a larger audience, and for services like Uber and Lyft and AirBnB to get their start. Facebook and Google changed strategies and went mobile first more than a decade ago when it became clear how big of a deal it would be, and Facebook paid $1B for Instagram, what was then a small startup of about 30 employees that got their start making an iPhone app.

Not every business is successful though, and going through Apple is part of the cost of doing business because it’s their storefront on their platform, a software platform where the included list of features can expand or shrink on a dime. App Store developers are in the same boat as YouTubers where their stream of revenue depends on a platform that changed over time, and YouTubers figured it out a while ago that to stay in business, they have to have a revenue stream other than YouTube and toe the policies.

If your business plan relies on the government coming in and busting your platform vendors chops, then you don’t have a very good business plan.

Life is tough, and so is business.