I'm an indie developer and I too think about how much of my destiny is tied to Apple. I think about it each time we launch another product. You have to when, rather than getting a bunch of sales from people all over, you get one check each month from Apple.

However, the other side of this tradeoff is that check from Apple is a lot more than it would be otherwise. In fact, I can safely say, that my business would not exist at all, if it were not for Apple and the App Store.

For people like Jalkut, who is one of the inner-circle of mac developers and fairly well known, there are many marketing opportunities. When he releases a new product, he is assured that daring fireball will write it up, and others as well, and suddenly he'll have a huge opening day. This is what worked for Wil Shipley so well. But we're not in that category.

Unlike the "chosen ones" (and it really is an insular, exclusive circle of those types who get that kind of coverage) most developers would not be able to even have an app business if it weren't for the App Store.

Thus, the App Store has allowed tens of thousands of startups to be built by a much broader segment of the population than ever before. You don't need VC, you don't need a bunch of employees, you don't even need an angel round, you just need a Mac, some time, and an $99 a year Apple developer account.

In addition to our startup, I have a friend who has supported himself for the past several years doing this writing apps. He's not trying to "do a startup", he's just started a lifestyle business.

Apples "control of destiny" is intrinsically linked to that opportunity. The opportunity comes form Apple selling your software for you in a single location. The only way Apple can do that-- given that people are constantly looking for opportunities to harass, denigrate, and sue Apple-- is to control what apps appear in the store.

Apple gets sued because people think that their free software update wasn't good enough! Serious class action lawsuits get launched for crap like that. So, of course, Apple is going to watch what's in the store.

But so long as you're offering a legitimate app, not trying to scam people, Apple doesn't really care.

I know people who have hated apple for 30 years think that this is some draconian thing... because every large company they've dealt with has habitually screwed over everyone they could. My thirty years as an apple customer giving superlative support and bending over backwards to not screw me over, gives me a great deal of trust in them.

Finally, there really is no real point in this campaign of worrying about whether Apple has too much control. Its obvious that its not illegal for Apple to offer an App store. So, why are we getting the daily articles like this? Why the campaign?

Its because the campaigners have an agenda. Their agenda is to promote android, and maybe get enough popular support for this idea (I once had someone tell me I was stupid for developing for iOS instead of android-- someone whose a consumer who knows nothing about anything technology wise has been reached by this campaign!)..... if the campaign is successful enough, then maybe they'll get legislation passed. Just like the anti-patent campaign wants to undermine patents, I think that's the real goal here.

And just how does it increase freedom for app development to be regulated by the government? We can see how that's worked out in other areas of government regulation of technology (though maybe the crowd here is too young to remember the dark ages of landline phone service where there was no innovation... certainly you can recognize that there are only 3 major cell carriers, and thus the prices are high. That's the result of the government deciding there could be only 3 spectrum owners in each metropolitan area, limiting competition via regulation.)

If Apple becomes untrustworthy, then we'll migrate our business. We'll take a hit, obviously, but the bigger fear is that there isn't any other venue to access the market like the App Store. Putting up a website and getting people to go to it, and then getting people to part with money is a whole lot more difficult than getting into the appstore. And it's a whole lot more expensive than Apple's %30 cut.

Apple is giving a huge opportunity here, and the restrictions of it are intrinsic to its nature.