In my opinion, Apple needs to acknowledge that, rather than acting like developers owe them the shirt off their backs.
Developers need to ally with each other, then they can force Apple’s hands.
What’s funny is that developers are practically in the best job to do that. Their jobs allow them tons of time to communicate with each other, they’re highly educated and able to communicate, and they have the know how to operate the mechanisms allowing them to communicate (forums, email, chat groups).
So what is stopping developers? I can only assume they’re not yet being taken advantage of by Apple sufficiently to warrant the efforts of banding together.
And the position is just like employees - one leaves, and mgt says "so what"? Many leave and mgt is screwed.
Maybe developers could even create a fund to help themselves survive a 'strike', and/or to help fund alternatives such as versions on Android.
Enough leave en masse, and Apple will have no choice but to listen.
Until then, Apple divides & conquers.
You seem to also be bizarrely comparing the app store and the apps hosted to the plight of workers and union action. Apps are in 99% of cases produced by business. Developers are but a single part of a business workforce, which could include HR, support, accounting, management and any number of other personal needed to keep a business running. Businesses don’t just go ‘on strike’.
The first parallel is that if one developer quits Apple, Apple won't even notice, but if enough do take the same action en masse, they have real power.
The second parallel is that if the the developers (not individual workers) want to seize this power, could form a consortium (analogous, but not equal to, a union). This consortium would pay into a collective fund via dues (not random donations). Yes, this costs part of the business' income, just as union dues cost part of workers' wages.
When they collectively decide to wield their power and attempt to force changes upon Apple, they could then use the savings to bridge the chasm of no income while negotiations proceed. They could also use the fund to support alternative platform development so the consortium members would be better able to sustain any 'strike' by having alternate platform revenue streams.
Apple is very much in the position of an exploitative employer. Apple and the employer both own key elements of the means of production, but are pretty much nowhere without the developers or the workers. Until developers band together to take some kind of collective action like this, Apple will continue to exploit them and extract every last possible fee. You might say "Apple will go too far and no one will develop for them", but at the point where they start losing developers, they just reduce the fees by a marginal amount.
It really is a no-win game for developers until they work together. (And when they do, it'll also be a bit the reverse if they go too far.).
EDIT: The alternative route is for most of them to suffer and hope one developer can spend the funds to take Apple to court and force changes that way, which is what is now happening, but that may also apply only country-by-country.
That is exactly what businesses do, and workers bargaining for wages is also “business”. If you do not like the terms of a deal, you walk away. Like Costco walking away from American Express, for example.
Another example is healthcare in the US. Payers (governments and managed care organizations), hospitals groups, doctor groups, and nurse unions have to band together to negotiate with each other.
Another example is when cable/satellite TV operators drop channels from their service if they do not like the terms being offered by the content owner.
Which would contradict the claim that developers are having to pay outsize fees compared to their relevance to Apple’s business.
For the record, I think transparency (in general) is always good, and so any terms and conditions that restrict price transparency are inherently bad for society.
An IPhone is pretty useful right out of the box. Not to mention that most of the apps that people actually use could be web pages. And if they really wanted to, apple could always dip into their cash reserves and start making more of their own apps.
It was good enough for the first year before the App Store existed, and it sold well enough to prove it.
Even now, it's plenty capable right out of the box without installing anything.
A device in 2007 that had first-party apps for email, web browsing, YouTube, weather, calendar, clock, address book, phone, calculator and music player, that also synced with your main personal computer was perfectly fine for many people.
Just look at Windows Phone, the biggest sticking point of every single device was that the app support just wasn’t there. While it’s hard to say with certainty, it seems that’s what ultimately stopped the platform gaining any traction.
The closest analogy to Apple is the game console industry. Even then it's a different scale.
IMO, the App Store situation is an entirely new class of problem unlikely to be solved in this case. It doesn't easily fall under existing monopoly regulation, and does have some advantages for consumers along with disadvantages. Unfortunately, I think Apple is being short sighted here. By not addressing the most egregious issues (30% for example), they are setting themselves up to be regulated which will probably end up being worse for everyone. A sledgehammer will end being used where a scalpel was needed.
I presume this was what the word "imagine" meant?