"Global Apple App Store revenue is set to increase to $4.9 billion in 2012, up from $2.9 billion in 2011, according to an IHS Screen Digest Mobile Analyst Commentary from information and analytics provider IHS (NYSE: IHS). This means that nearly half of the revenue generated by the App Store in its five-year history will be earned this year alone."
Those are some pretty strong numbers. Given that the number is projected, even with a generous error rate of +-20%, any revenue from developer fee will be eclipsed by 4.9 billion.
While the author's estimate that apple generates 15% of its revenue from developers is inaccurate, it has to be said that the entry fee to get into iphone / ipad development is high. I would know since I'm currently developing a product that works across iphone / android / web. Here are our costs thus far (excluding phone-device prices ).
Apple:
Mac Air 1200$
Developer account 99$
DUNS number 200$
Server certificate for notifications 175$
Android: Developer account 25$
<For development - Use the mac or boot an old clunky win laptop with Win-XP on it>
Web: 0$ so far
Developing for apple devices is costly. For the same 1200$ that I could spend on mac air, I can get 2 powerful Win-7 laptops - ~ 500-700$ each [2]. Device fragmentation on android does require you to test on more devices, but there are services[3] that allow you to work around that problem. Besides, when netflix can release their app by testing it on a subset of 8 android devices [4], I don't see why that strategy is not good enough for others.
The author does have a point, but one that should not have been expressed as a percentage of apple revenues.
[1] - http://www.isuppli.com/Media-Research/News/pages/Maps-and-Pa...
[2] - http://www.dell.com/us/soho/p/vostro-laptop-deals
[3] - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1852248/is-there-an-andro...
[4] - http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/03/testing-netflix-on-andro...
[EDIT] - Formatting