The hole I see in your argument is that I have never seen developing free apps on the App Store as some sort of loophole.
Apple has supported the existence of free apps. On paid apps, they get their 30% cut. On free apps, they get a token $99/year fee and all the profits from their hardware sales.
The above arrangement is both profitable and sustainable for Apple. And Apple's interests are in keeping their end users and developers happy in a virtuous cycle.
I just don't agree that developers should be called foolish unless they adopt the utmost cynical view of things.
What kind of "free" apps are you talking about? I'm talking about a "free" app where I download it for free, then I click a link in my "free" app that takes me to Amazon's web store where I pay with my credit card to buy stuff.
Is that the kind of "free" app you're talking about? Or are you talking about something else? Because I don't think Apple is taking 30% of the other kind of free apps, the ones that don't involve me paying for things with my credit card.
I admit I was talking about the latter. I went with the tl;dr, didn't read your blog post, and made the assumption that you were talking about all free apps, not just the apps with paid subscription content being served through them.
That still leaves a lot of app developers who aren't Amazon or a large publishing house. Could be a pure SaaS company (whatever that means) that later came out with a native app. Or an app that falls in the gray area of charging a subscription for functionality but yet still handles "content," such as Readability or Instapaper.
Were all these developers expected to assume that they would become targets? I imagine this is where we still disagree. But do let me know if you were only talking about Amazon and other large content publishers.
Your opinion isn't the one that counts. Apple's is. A loophole is whatever Apple says it is.
Yesterday, an ebook reader tied to your store wasn't a loophole, today it is. Today, SaaS may not be a loophole, but who knows about tomorrow? Today non-Apple ads aren't a loophole, but some have speculated that iAds may be required in the future. And so on.
Apple has supported the existence of free apps. On paid apps, they get their 30% cut. On free apps, they get a token $99/year fee and all the profits from their hardware sales.
The above arrangement is both profitable and sustainable for Apple. And Apple's interests are in keeping their end users and developers happy in a virtuous cycle.
I just don't agree that developers should be called foolish unless they adopt the utmost cynical view of things.