Right, and that's not my position at all. I enjoy being compensated for my own development work, although I'm in a position where we can release that work open source as well as to our paying customers. So I'd have happily kicked them $2 or even $10 if I wasn't giving 30% of it to the middleman.

I know I'm also giving 30% of my Android app purchases to middlemen, but at least those middlemen aren't making arbitrary decisions about what those apps are allowed to do, or which APIs they can use. (I guess some of the carrier-branded/customized phones do those sort of things, but I don't tihnk the Android Market itself is facilitating that sort of control, and I've managed to avoid using one of those phones.)

I honestly don't see how anyone can look at what's happened over the last year or so and see non-Apple store applications thriving in the future. The developer's choice is to be a second-class citizen (with second-class API access) or fork over 30% of their gross. This is a very hostile act toward the development community, and I don't think integrating homebrew comes close to making up for that hostility.