I'd argue that a lot of us in the "Apple fan community," including Marco, understand that there are negatives to Apple's approach to, well, nearly everything. It's apparently very easy for people to pick up on the approval we give Apple while glossing over the criticism, I suspect in part because we don't tend to see iOS's locked-down nature as the existential crisis that, well, Hacker News readers tend to sometimes see -- and because we don't see a problem with something that they see as a deal-breaker, then, well, we must never say anything bad about Apple. In fact, we often do.
Having said that, there's at least a practical difference in the kind of "monoculture" that the iOS App Store represents and the kind of monoculture that Google Reader represented: while Apple may change the terms, it's highly unlikely they'd ever make the App Store just go away. I'm not sure there are any commercial products that were in the App Store and were then removed because of a change in Apple's TOS rather than for a violation that they should have been aware of when they submitted it. There are some high-profile cases of stupid rejections, to be sure, but that's not the same thing.
And, it's at least worth noting that a major difference there is that Apple derives revenue from their services. Say what you will about them, but that's a pretty good incentive to not just take their ball and go home. Google Reader didn't bring in any revenue, and that's what ultimately doomed it. (as in beer) does work, but not indefinitely.
> I'm not sure there are any commercial products that were in the App Store and were then removed because of a change in Apple's TOS
Well, at the very least, the removal gun has been pointed at a lot of commercial apps when Apple has decided to "re-interpret" the TOS.
For instance, it used to be standard practice to kick someone out to your website to buy an ebook (i.e. the appropriate alternative to IAP). Over the course of several months, it became a TOS violation.
Apps that required an external subscription used to include sign-up links on their login screen. Now they don't.
How many commercial apps were hit by the Apple's app store programming language restriction?
Or, if we're including the Mac App Store, how many apps and developers have left it over sandboxing?
Yes, Apple isn't likely to shut down their app store completely. But, whenever they want, they can (and might sometimes do) kill a part of it that you care about, for their own internal reasons.
Google ran Reader for 8 years. Incidently, I bought a Mac Pro which Apple dropped support for any hardware older than late 2008. I could not get Mountain Lion for my Mac Pro, even thought there was no real reason why it could not run it from a performance stand point. As a result, I switched my main desktop from a Mac Pro to a Ubuntu Linux. Neither Microsoft nor Linux aggressively drop old hardware off the face of the earth like this.
Apple, with its $100 billion in cash couldn't afford a few resources to continue supporting perfectly working hardware? They essentially deprecated my $4000 computer, because some of the commercial software I used only shipped newer updates on Mountain Lion. (and before you trot out the 64-bit EFI/Graphics Driver excuse, keep in mind both Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux can be installed on this old machine and take full advantage of it, including up-to-date drivers. Apple makes many times more profit than Microsoft, and yet can't fund appropriate support for their full line of HW)
Point being, I was a paying customer, and I still got ditched. Apparently, it is not enough to merely derive revenue, it has to be large amounts of revenue. Hence, Apple stiffs the "Pro" market. Google could have made money from Reader, but the reality was, too few people were using it even though it was free. Lesson: if you are a niche community, you can get screwed, Apple, Google, it doesn't matter.
And by the way, many apps were kicked out of the app store for having links in them which lead to a page where you could purchase something through the web browser.
Having said that, there's at least a practical difference in the kind of "monoculture" that the iOS App Store represents and the kind of monoculture that Google Reader represented: while Apple may change the terms, it's highly unlikely they'd ever make the App Store just go away. I'm not sure there are any commercial products that were in the App Store and were then removed because of a change in Apple's TOS rather than for a violation that they should have been aware of when they submitted it. There are some high-profile cases of stupid rejections, to be sure, but that's not the same thing.
And, it's at least worth noting that a major difference there is that Apple derives revenue from their services. Say what you will about them, but that's a pretty good incentive to not just take their ball and go home. Google Reader didn't bring in any revenue, and that's what ultimately doomed it. (as in beer) does work, but not indefinitely.