> the market value of everything that runs on the phone is much larger than the phone. Not by any metric I can find. Apple has a market cap of 2 trillion; hal

> the market value of everything that runs on the phone is much larger than the phone. Not by any metric I can find. Apple has a market cap of 2 trillion; half their revenue of 260B is phone. The market cap of all mobile companies is dwarfed by Apple.... Mobile app sales total 76B a year, including both iOS and Android. The iOS part is around half of that value. So by one simple metric, Apple revenue on phones is around 130B a year, mobile revenue on iOS is around 38B..... What metric did you base this "much larger" claim? Did you base it on market numbers or make it up? >I'd love freely moddable console games and if developers could publish There's plenty of such platforms. They don't take off. Ask yourself why. Conspiracy stuff like "the big men stop them" is not the answer. Even huge players like Steam have tried - and they certainly have the resources to push such a thing. It failed. Why didn't developers rush to these free to publish on platforms? Maybe you are missing important things about the value of the platform versus the value of the software. >What are you afraid of, too much competition and freedom? Competition is not breaking contracts as you see fit. Competition will not exist without rule of law - this is basic econ. You'll end up with chaos and theft when contracts cannot be enforced. And you're welcome to do whatever you want. Buy other hardware if you don't like Apple's terms of service. Build a product and sell it if you think there's demand for a different product. People buy Apple because they find more value in it, as is, than their other choices. The same as people who value freedom and openness are allowed to buy other products as they see fit. I don't understand why people continually think they have some rights they simply don't historically, legally, or even morally. Just like I'd expect you to claim it's immoral for some other entity to force things you created to adhere to their whims, or hand over value to you because you demand it, you have no moral right to do that to others. I guess we just see it differently on the morality of forcing others to bend their work to our whims. You also forget that once Atari did let developers publish will nilly on Atari 2600, and there was such a deluge of crap, that the market and platform crashed. Nintendo and all following companies learned that lesson: everyday consumers don't have the skill to protect themselves from crap, so to make a solid consumer platform, the owner of the hardware should provide significant protection for users.