Platform Ecosystems and Lock-In

Apple's App Store takes roughly 15 to 30 percent of every purchase made through it, and Apple built neither the apps nor the games nor the books. It built the platform, and the platform collects a toll from everyone who wants to reach its users. When it opened in 2008, developers built tens of thousands of apps for free, each one making the iPhone more useful and harder to leave. Microsoft ran the same play with Windows a generation earlier, and Salesforce extended it into the enterprise with AppExchange. The platform owner invests in the core once; third parties fund the expansion with their own capital and labor, and the switching costs compound with every integration.

For founders and operators, the first question is which side of this you are on. Are you building a platform others build on, or building on someone else's, one rule change away from disaster? The model mints money through access fees and revenue shares, but it carries a built-in detonator: extract too much and it starts to feel like a tax, which invites both regulators and a coalition of furious developers, exactly as Epic and the EU have shown against Apple. What makes lock-in genuinely durable rather than theoretical, and where the toll becomes the trigger, is what the app holds back.