Apple is a single focus of power. Developers are numberless and spread all over the world. Your suggestion to try to combat that situation by concentrating, ess

Apple is a single focus of power. Developers are numberless and spread all over the world. Your suggestion to try to combat that situation by concentrating, essentially "unionizing", developers, would fail for two reasons. One, the developers are so numerous, diverse, and independent of one another that there would be an endless supply of developers willing to "cross union picket lines" and make more money with the competition reduced. In a sense, it's like a mine with a hundred times as many miners as it needs, most of whom are struggling to get more than an hour a month of paid work and would do anything to get more. Also, the most important "miners", Apple itself, Google and Facebook, have their own agendas and wouldn't care about any "developers' union", and if you combine the apps Apple, Google, and Facebook contribute to the iOS platform, the vast majority of the rest of the devs could disappear with almost no impact on Apple other than that Apple would stop announcing the number of apps in the app store during keynotes. They'll eventually stop that anyway. Two, Apple makes very little of its money from app sales. The indie devs aren't the real miners. The miners are the actual employees of Apple and Foxconn. Apple sells hardware, and as long as they have their own apps, and apps from Google, Facebook, a couple of big game makers who are getting rich on iOS and aren't going to walk away from it, plus apps from a small percentage of the indie devs, consumers will keep buying Apple hardware. Again, the vast majority of iOS devs could "walk off the job" and the "mine" would keep operating as if nothing had happened, other than a bit of editing to the semi-annual PR message. An "iOS developers' union" would have so little leverage over Apple that Apple probably wouldn't even "fire" developers who joined it (revoke their dev credentials). It could simply ignore them and go on with its business.