At the end of the day though, the general public doesn't care one bit how Apple "treat" developers, so it's all fairly moot.
I keep hearing similar logic from lots of people - but surely you would agree that the general public cares about what cool apps they can run on their iPhone vs. their neighbor's Android? Up until now most devs have grit their teeth and tolerated the App store policies since they were outweighed by Apple's superior market size, UX, and even dev tools (Xcode, instruments, the simulator, and the SDK itself are all probably more well-thought out than their Android counterparts). But if you push them hard enough, they will move, and not just the ones with free software moral outrage.
Lots of other people have compared Apple's policies favorably with the policies of the video game console manufacturers. I invite those people to look at the history of what happened in the mid '90s in the transition from the Genesis/SNES era to the PlayStation/N64 era.
I keep hearing similar logic from lots of people - but surely you would agree that the general public cares about what cool apps they can run on their iPhone vs. their neighbor's Android? Up until now most devs have grit their teeth and tolerated the App store policies since they were outweighed by Apple's superior market size, UX, and even dev tools (Xcode, instruments, the simulator, and the SDK itself are all probably more well-thought out than their Android counterparts). But if you push them hard enough, they will move, and not just the ones with free software moral outrage.
Lots of other people have compared Apple's policies favorably with the policies of the video game console manufacturers. I invite those people to look at the history of what happened in the mid '90s in the transition from the Genesis/SNES era to the PlayStation/N64 era.