It’s bad enough that being an “official” Apple developer requires you to pay a license fee even if you’re only building free apps that don’t earn you a cent.

And I can definitely see Microsoft following in Apple’s footsteps the way they did with Windows Phone 7.

Similarly steam is mentioned; Valve and their partners will not abandon their successful DRM platform, and I can’t see Apple sacrificing their gamers in this way. I call paranoia on this one.

And just to add one more counter to Michael’s point–I used to work at Download.com and we did indeed make developers pay to list their software on our site. AND we audited submissions based on the same basic criteria Apple uses. And developers complained. But they still listed with us because they (the shareware industry) were making $4 billion a year through our site.

So far I haven’t seen any data stating that there is going to be an iOS-style automatic license that is actually enforced by the OS.

If there isn’t, I suspect there will be problems getting vendors of high-value (high priced) software (Adobe, et al) to put full-function apps in the Mac App Store. There will probably (at least initially) be problems with even some of the more expensive shareware.

If, however, auto-licensing is built-in (somehow) so that someone can’t usefully put a purchased app on BitTorrent, then the app store may have the interesting side effect of lowering software retail price levels while retaining and/or increasing developer profitability. The small developer, particularly, could concentrate on actual coding, rather than having to spend way too much time doing marketing.

Read my blog post for more on this:
http://www.ignition3.com/development/mac-store-on-windows.html

So the answer to the Mac App Store is not an OS. But it’s the open web stores like the Mozilla Web Store platform and the Google Chrome Web Store.

Those will be the true competitors to the Mac store. And as a developer myself, it looks much more tempting to develop for a platform that can reach everyone, than for a platform that can only reach a few.

Desktop stores like the Mac or Ubuntu stores does have advantages. But the line between desktop and web apps is getting thinner each year. And thanks to html5, will disappear in a few years.

Secondly, running app stores has a cost to Apple — they have to maintain the SDK (in this case, DRM for the apps, packaging code, installs/updates/etc), servers, storefront like top apps, staff favorites, noteworthy, etc, and developer front (all documentation, portals to submit apps), and finally review committed, which itself is very expensive. In the end, Apple does not make money off of this — their itunes music store and iphone/ipad app store actually run at barely break even: they dont profit from them, thats what they declare in earnings reports.