Platform Sharecropping Risks

Platforms exist for the benefit of platforms, not users.

This is a recurring theme.. if you don't want to be in this position, then don't build on top of someone else's closed platform. When you do that, expect to see this situation because that is what such platforms are designed for!

Creators won't bother to find alternative platforms until the users leave the harmful dominant one.

Creators would love it. Platform owners would hate it.

The problem is that these platforms have gotten so big that it's hard to directly compete against them.Instead, developers have decided to join them, knowing full well that the platform owners hold all the marbles and can yank the rug out from under you at any time.What's interesting to me is that Apple is getting lambasted over their 'closed platform', but we can clearly see with Twitter and Facebook that the 'open web' suffers similar problems when you build to someone else's platform.

You should not be allowed to build a platform and then compete unfair with apps for that platform.

By "they" do you mean the companies that own those platforms? Or somebody else? Do you mean that someone else could take their platforms away from them?

You're a sharecropper. It doesn't matter how much you pour your heart and soul into someone else's platform it's still their platform. They don't owe you anything, they care about one thing, maximizing their profits. People sometimes appeal to the large corporation pleading that helping the "ecosystem" will make more money for everybody. But this is not necessarily true. There are many situations where screwing over the ecosystem in some way maximizes the corpo

Platform owners are the new land users and developers are share croppers.If you develop for a platform, like Apple or Facebook or Twitter, you are basing your business on the whim of the platform owner.Every change in development license for Facebook/Apple has killed off some company who got in their way.Zynga is estimated to be worth $5 billion, but it is running on Facebook. At anytime, Facebook can kill Zynga or force it to pay a large tax to be on their platform. Otherwise, Zynga mi

I feel platform companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft don't really care about these services and only see them as a tool against their platform competitors. Here I see a lot of similarities with companies like Wallmart.Unless I really have to, I try to avoid using services directly controlled by platforms since they can without hesitation make changes that are bad for users but good for them. It will simply be harder to leave them and they know it.