No it wasn't, nor are Apple devices given for free to students.
Anyone that can afford Apple hardware as an high school student surely can afford the dev subscription.
Anyone that can afford Apple hardware as an high school student surely can afford the dev subscription.
Plus I have known many offshore colleagues from African and Asian countries that managed to be successful in selling software, despite the conditions they were raised in.
So painting the Apple story as gate keeping is playing it short, there are many ways to skin a rabbit.
I'm not going to sit around all day and play pity-party with you about impoverished developers. I've known my fair share too, and I might even be one depending on your definition of poor living conditions. The point is simple: Apple stops people from doing arbitrary stuff for no reason. Perhaps you don't care; I'm not arguing that. Maybe it doesn't stop people from getting rich; obviously, money is still made. Regardless, everyone knows their deal stinks like shit - the cat's out of the bag. Apple bought themselves a couple months with the 15% punch-line, but the laughing stops next year.
This isn't controversial or high-concept stuff. You should be able to freely install stuff on your iPhone even if you don't personally intend to. It seems like by-and-large, the democratic world agrees.
It is up for the customers to validate their business decisions.
If you try to take your business elsewhere, you have no market, because no one else is able to create a store which targets the same market. This is entirely unlike a grocery store, because if Safeway is unreasonable you can launch an entire store just for your own products and people can shop at both.
However, with these curated store platforms, a user can only use the App Store. They can get a different phone--at ridiculous expense, as there are numerous anticompetitive lock-in mechanisms with respect to licenses that prevent this: I would, for example, lose access to all of the music and books and apps I've ever bought--but then they aren't able to use the App Store anymore.
The problem is that virtually all sane people only carry around a single phone. This is not true of grocery stores or frankly any other form of store unless you map the analogy to geographic regions, where people have to move to a new house in a different community--at great difficulty and expense--to get to another grocery store. Even if you only have a monopoly over one "small" region, that's still a monopoly.
UWP died because the large pool of Windows developers didn't want to buy into it.
Second, Web also exists.
Third, this whole thread is about macOS.
> Yes, a company has the right to do whatever they want with their products. > It is up for the customers to validate their business decisions.
So, to verify: you do agree that your argument at least does not apply to the iPhone?
Still the point stands.
Do you want to defend Apple's absolute control over the iPhone in front of God, Saurik and everyone, or admit that the world's richest company operates out of greed sometimes?
Are Apple’s fees worth 15%[1] of the vendors revenue? Possibly not, though as a provider, they are entitled to make a profit.
[1] Yes, yes; 30% if the vendor make > $1,000,000. Let get real, the significant majority of the app that you are arguing about are likely to be grossing less than that. And of course 15% of $0 is $0, so the argument is completely moot for freely distributed apps.
The big thing people seem to disagree with is Apple forcing themselves to be a provider (and thereby forcing their entitlement to a profit). Apple is certainly entitled to compensation when people use their service, but no computer should force it's services on the user. Regulators seem to really hate that bit, and it will be interesting to see how Apple responds to the Digital Markets act.