Sharecropping also has a strong parallel to making apps for somebody else's walled garden. You do the labour to create the app, you do the labour of finding th

Sharecropping also has a strong parallel to making apps for somebody else's walled garden. You do the labour to create the app, you do the labour of finding the right product-market fit, you take all the risks, and the landlord takes 30% or whatever for themselves, in exchange for ostensibly providing you with a platform you could not build and popularize yourself. Everyone complains heartily about the 30%, but for a lot of sharecroppers, that's just the cost of doing business and they do fine. The bigger problem is when the landlord crunches some numbers and decides that their platform would benefit from commoditizing your app. When that happens, they do things like buy your competitor, rebrand it as their own app, and give it away preinstalled. For example... "The True Story of Audion:" https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ Or they just use all the market data they have thanks to your app to build their own app and use their brand and muscle to squeeze you into irrelevance. Microsoft in its heyday was famous for this. Just ask Lotus about Excel, or ask WordPerfect about Word.