xurble2

With regard to your point on exposition on and the question "says who?"

Well David Mamet for one:

Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of shit.

Any time any character is saying to another "as you know", that is, telling another character what you, the writer, need the audience to know, the scene is a crock of shit.

http://ezinearticles.com/?David-Mamets-Rules-For-Writers---W...

Not having seen inception, I can't judge if the exposition somehow avoids this problem, but in general I feel like Mamet is as good an authority as any to appeal to :)

By that definition, so are Android developers.

Firstly, the platform vendor - Google - can and does ship competing products for free (turn by turn navigation anyone?).

Secondly even though Android is free you still rely on the manufacturers to ship it on actual phones. They could all jump ship for Windows Phone 7 leaving you with no platform (go with it, it's a thought expermient).

I understand that this is a 7 year old article and that Tim Bray has undergone a road to Damascus conversion to Android Apps over the web, but even if you accept his original conclusion that you are only not a sharecropper if you run your own web stack, it doesn't really afford you much extra security. Google could come along and release a competitor to your product and give it away for free.

In summary: we're almost all sharecroppers because the definition is so wide and even those who aren't face a similarly large but different risk meaning that being a sharecropper isn't necessarily much worse, if worse at all.

Dumb app store rejections still suck mightily though :)