This is Ben Thompson’s third article in his series on enabling sustainable business in the App Store. (The whole series is quite fantastic, I suggest you start at the beginning: I, II, and IIb.)
In this third piece, Ben talks about the business model and mindset that Apple has towards the iOS App Store, and how it may be the foundation for why it can be difficult to build a sustainable business around productivity apps. In short, he makes the case for why it is that the apps which truly set iOS apart (the killer apps) are not the ones which make money hand over fist. The hand-over-fist money-making apps are casual games. And casual games are not the must-have apps of iOS, nor are they platform differentiators (you can find most popular iOS games on Android as well).