Wow, so much ignorance to unravel. App stores were first developed for actual commercial use by Steve Jobs based on concepts pioneered at Next (way before its time). The first commercial use was actually the iTunes store, selling music. Software developers, like musicians , were victims of large companies, seeing few royalties snd only salaries for their work. Music could only be bought in albums , except for the odd single, and the lowest price for software was something like 20-50 bucks , with most software costing way more . Enter Jobs, and artists or programmers could self publish and get 70% of their sales , up from 2-5% if somebody actually published their work. Software prices tumbled, and you could buy a song for a dollar. Not exactly a monopolistic greedy bastard, was he. All you need to do now is allow different sources on the app stores, linux repository style (with a few tweaks), and problems solved. ps: as a small developer , keeping 70% of revenue for access to a market of millions is amazing. If you're Epic you ***** about Apple's 'criminal fees' while charging 30% on your end, and then play the victim to better enable your hypocrisy. 70% of gross revenues for access to a market of millions is amazing for the little guy, but sucks for the whales.
