In some sense developers are already ripping off their users, because they've made the app but are still charging for it / monetizing it, even after it's paid back the development costs and then some. Many apps don't reach that threshold and live in the minimal adoption range, but it's hard to assign blame to Apple for that. And the apps talked about here are the popular ones that have presumably recouped their initial investment many times over. So the complaints in the article read like "I was getting paid tons of money for doing almost nothing and then Apple stopped it."

I imagine in a better world the business model for apps would be simpler, something like a vulnerability bounty program but instead an app bounty program. Same with Amazon, maybe they could acquire Kickstarter and provide product development services instead of sniping new products. And in both cases the end user would get it for unit cost (0-ish for software, more for physical stuff). It requires people to get used to buying products months away from release though, not sure how to address that.