You make a great point that I didn't really think of! Apple definitely tries to massage their optics. Could also be why Apple's store is also more criticized than Google's, even though there's a lot more garbage on the Play Store.
We need absolute control over our platform -> so that we can control the user experience -> so that we can make the iPhone ecosystem a more private, secure, safe, high quality place
If it turns out the reason they need absolute control is so that Apple can milk whales in the same way Zynga did... well, IMHO people are entitled to call hypocrite angrily.
That's not the world I want to be living in.
Competition breeds excellence. Monopoly breeds complacency.
If you want to make the case that launching a new mobile phone platform is as easy now, I'm all ears.
I think that very few of them are significant enough to flood over the moat Apple and Google have built.
Among those? Screen-less mobile computing (glasses/HUD) and true conversational AI agents.
But the rub is that (particularly within the Apple ecosystem), a competitor has to not just be better (on day 1, vs the 14+ years of iPlatform evolution), but better enough that people are willing to jettison the entire Apple platform for a competitor.
Which means Apple can release later, with less quality, and still retain most of their users. That's the evil genius of pivoting to a platform / services company.
Google to some degree, albeit to a lesser extent, since their services aren't as tightly coupled to first party hardware.
It’s so fascinating how other people’s inventions are “obvious” and not worthy of exorbitant fees, while our own inventions are unique and clearly deserve special protections.
You could repeat that for any product that has a dominant player somewhere up it's value chain.