More than a decade ago, I blamed the victims. I still do, in a way. When you build on top of someone else's platform, you are engaged in digital sharecropping.

More than a decade ago, I blamed the victims. I still do, in a way. When you build on top of someone else's platform, you are engaged in digital sharecropping. The platform owner acts like they own your customers, and you are tilling the landlord's fields in exchange for 70% of what you can earn selling your app. You may think the landlord is taking an outrageous cut of "your" sales, but the landlord thinks they own the relationship with their customer, and you only exist to do product/market fit and sizing research for them. Joel Spolsky put it extremely well way back in the day in his "Strategy Letter V:" All else being equal, demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease... Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements. (Link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ Recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26657166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26657166) Platforms always want to commoditize the apps that run on top of their platform. If they don't buy you and bundle your product, they'll do everything in their power to drive your revenue down until you are living on ramen noodles. Anti-trust might help stop them from turning cross-platform apps into uni-platform apps, but the larger problem that remains unsolved is that platforms are powerful and it is in their best interests to drive app revenue down to zero.