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Never? There are many cases of highly successful businesses being based upon a 3rd party API. E.g.: every successful software company that sold CP/M, DOS, Windows or UNIX software.

Perhaps a better statement would be: understand that there are risks inherent to building for any given API, study those risks, and mitigate them.

CP/M seems to be dying off? Hope you've started your DOS port already :)

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You make a valid point, but I was referring more specifically to web based services and more tightly controlled micro-commerce platforms and operating systems. Considering the high market share of Android I can't fathom ever not building both an Android and iOS version of an app, regardless of cost you have one or the other to fallback on. If both fail however, then you have a mega problem.

The key difference is that there is no way for Microsoft to revoke an application from a users pc (pre app store I mean)

The existing apps were not revoked and still work.

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