The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.
From Paul Graham’s excellent article on the iPhone AppStore:
The dictator in the 1984 ad isn’t Microsoft, incidentally; it’s IBM. IBM seemed a lot more frightening in those days, but they were friendlier to developers than Apple is now.
But the most worrying part, in my view, is that people (and especially developers) are keener on accepting the ludicrous terms that Apple is imposing on them than they were even a few years ago.
We are lemmings. Not only do we accept such terms, we are so glad that we consider them privileges too.
I enjoy downloading famous game titles from the AppStore and check them out. After I played a bit NBA Live (all the playoffs series) and FIFA 2010, I had a discussion on #macdev@Freenode about the number of teams required to build such an application. The graphics are stunning for such small device and for 7,99 € I don’t think that it’s an interesting market compared to the PS3, XBOX, PC or Wii market.
The answer by most active developers was that only a small %, makes ‘real money’ out of the AppStore right now.
Considering, Apple’s policy, recent departures and developers comments on the matter, I think that a becoming an iPhone developer is not as good as it seems at first glance.
Maybe with the arrival of Android 2.0 better days will come for smartphones developers.