If that shiny cool mall makes your business unviable, either because they charge extortionist fees or because they impose so many restrictions that you can't make the ends meet (or simply ban you outright because you compete with something they want to get into), then it is completely irrelevant that the customers that come to shop there are rich and willing to spend money. You are still going bankrupt.
And we are getting to this point. The amount of BS an app developer on the Apple platform has to jump through to do anything is beyond ridiculous (yes, I did try to develop for iDevices professionally) - and that is before even this stuff with the 30% transaction cuts.
The time when those $10-$20/apiece apps could actually pay your salary is long past unless you happen to be the one of the very few that has hit a jackpot with an extremely popular app. But Apple keeps piling up new requirements, restrictions and overhead on developers, jacking up various fees - and if you don't like it, they just ban you outright.
At some point people decide they had enough and cut their loses. There are better and easier ways to make money than with iPhone app development.
And we are getting to this point. The amount of BS an app developer on the Apple platform has to jump through to do anything is beyond ridiculous (yes, I did try to develop for iDevices professionally) - and that is before even this stuff with the 30% transaction cuts.
The time when those $10-$20/apiece apps could actually pay your salary is long past unless you happen to be the one of the very few that has hit a jackpot with an extremely popular app. But Apple keeps piling up new requirements, restrictions and overhead on developers, jacking up various fees - and if you don't like it, they just ban you outright.
At some point people decide they had enough and cut their loses. There are better and easier ways to make money than with iPhone app development.