mfrasier It's about time lawmakers are paying attention. I mean the fact that I NEED to buy their hardware/OS to even submit an app. It's annoying that I keep getting forced onto a platform that I just don't care for.
You have a short memory. When the iPhone came out the only competitor, for e.g. mobile gaming, was something like a Nintendo DS or Sony PSP.
To develop for one of those you couldn't just use any old Mac, or Windows PC. You needed to buy a dev kit, which was a very expensive hardware emulator you could test you game on. Very expensive, and useless for anything else. You had to buy the software to develop for it, which ran on your PC.
Then there was the cost of signing up as a developer, and the cost of submitting your app and getting it tested. Each time you did this it cost many thousands of dollars, and took time. Then the cost of manufacturing and the cut Sony/Nintendo took.
Developing for iOS was a breath of fresh air. You can use any old Mac, though you need a relatively modern one for the latest Xcode. You pay a flat subscription to be an Apple developer, and Apple take a 30% cut of revenues. These terms and costs are so reasonable compared to previous handhelds, or compared to e.g. traditional retail, that the market exploded. Google's terms are much the same, and the Play market is similarly successful.