I think you could argue up front and ongoing costs for either scenario. The duplication of an app for each install is technically very low cost (although you c

I think you could argue up front and ongoing costs for either scenario. The duplication of an app for each install is technically very low cost (although you could say that the app store taking 30% is a cost there), that doesn't mean there weren't large up front costs and ongoing ones as well. What about maintenance, support, infrastructure like servers/services/bandwidth. For anything of a decent size you probably have to do these things, which means you probably need staff, which means you probably need an office, benefits, insurance, all the usual business costs. That's not even bringing up the constant updates, new features, and supporting the ever changing platform or environment it runs on, which is all completely expected by users. Apps are as much of a regular business as anything else, not some magic special case.