Even when they don't kill the service, they can increase its price so dramatically overnight that it may as well have been killed, as many who built a business

Even when they don't kill the service, they can increase its price so dramatically overnight that it may as well have been killed, as many who built a business on Google Maps discovered. When Google makes almost all of its money on advertising, everything else is of so little concern to them that they can kill a service or arbitrarily make a change that they expect will literally drive away 90% of its customers, and it won't matter. Apple is that way about 3rd-party developers, too. When they make almost all of the software in-house that they hope you will use, they can make platform changes that will break others' apps and shrug it off. Their software will be prepared for the changes, and if you can't afford to keep rebuilding your product given the tiny price you have to sell it for, Apple won't notice that you're gone. Apple could probably set up a special program for about a dozen major software providers (Adobe, Google, Facebook,...), tell the rest to build web apps (as Jobs originally planned), and Apple would "bravely" get past the howls of complaint and move on mostly unscathed. The majority of us really need to be as biased as we reasonably can be toward open systems, standards, and platforms that can't be shut down by a single, large player that has no need for our business.