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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

"The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give." - Adam Smith

The App Store developers are now farmers on Apple's domain, and their landlord has figured out they can pay more.

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As opposed to Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, and for all intents and purposes Google?

> The App Store developers are now farmers on Apple's domain

What do you mean by "now"? As far as I can tell, it has always been like that.

In a sense, yes. However, I think the farmers in this analogy were more willing/able to be nomadic in the earlier days of osx and ios apps, where now they are much more likely to make the land their permanent home.

This could be because the app store is more stable or reliable as a source of income or from a realization that the Mac App store is the best/only way to present information to a sufficiently wide audience - that wasn't really something developers knew to be true in the earlier years I imagine - maybe the thoughtful ones knew but the rest were still warming up their feet.

Good.

What you expect? You're not a big company like Google or Apple that owns the land.

Do you think that, for example, youtubers aren't farmers in the google's farm?

Or that web developers and content creators aren't farmers for the ad networks?

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