I was speaking to the pointlessness of a hypothetical boycott, not arguing directly with you. I disagree that the device is crippled without 3rd party apps. I

I was speaking to the pointlessness of a hypothetical boycott, not arguing directly with you. I disagree that the device is crippled without 3rd party apps. It may not be quite as useful or perhaps fun, but it would still be a far more useful device than a Motorola Razr phone or a Blackberry. Yes it’s a new premise. Apple provides an app market to 1.65B devices to app developers with little entrance risk to the devs much beyond the elbow grease they spent creating the app. How much more money and effort would a developer have to spend to get their app that level of exposure without the App Store? A lot, and all of it amounting to real dollars at risk with no guarantee of payoff. What’s truly at risk publishing at the App Store? Nothing but a publishers time. Even the 30% you pay to Apple only hits if you are making money. It’s a commission, they marketed and sold the app for you, handled the transaction, distribution, and dropped some cash in your bank account. 30% in my mind is pretty cheap for what you get. Any other business that relied on third parties services to handle the marketing, sales, shipping, and finance transaction of the product would not bat an eye if those costs ran to 30%. As for Unix and Windows deciding to charge a fee? That wouldn’t bother me a bit if they were marketing, selling, and handling the transaction for my app. Do it.