I see the App Store no different than any retailer. If you want to sell your products in WalMart, then you agree to their terms (which happen to be quite onerous), and they set the price that they want. If you don't like it, you don't have to sell your product in Walmart. You can still sell it at Target (if you agree to their terms), etc., or you can try to open your own store and try to reach your target customers directly (and incur the related costs of doing so).
This is the problem with metaphor; eventually their legs run out.
The more correct metaphor is: Walmart sells you a coloring book. In the back of that coloring book there's a mail-in coupon: send it in, $5 for a second coloring book. Walmart now not only expects to make a cut on that initial coloring book sale; they expect to make a cut on that mail-in sale.
One might say: Wait a second, if I'm going to buy that second coloring book, its probably because the first one was so good. If I'm going to buy a book from Kindle, its probably because that book was surfaced to me in the Kindle app. Walmart and Apple didn't exactly have a large hand in making that second sale happen; my product clearly had a much larger hand in it. Apple would, of course, disagree; because they have a god complex.
I understand what you're saying but the original metaphor still stands.
In-app purchases are like other related products produced by your company, which you are still selling through Walmart -- it's just that you're not using Walmart's payment system for purchases.
Not analogous at all. Amazon is the online equivalent of that.
You the consumer can go to a different store any time on a whim. You can shop anywhere online with a click.
Not the App Store, which controls what and how over half of Americans can access, and the barrier to switching OS-es is fucking huge. How is this remotely the same
