The complaints from Apple developers have been around forever. Waxing nostalgic, I remember threads on the old Mousehole BBS about Apple and its love-hate relationship with developers. The reaction to Apple steamrolling Panic is classic, and there was a major furor over the dashboard and the way it steamrolled third party widget frameworks.

I suspect that Jeff is in a Microsoft-centric culture, so he simply doesn't spend as much time talking to Apple developers as he does Microsoft developers, so of course he hears more from them. Likewise, there are way more Windows developers than OS X developers, so you'll always hear more about anything from them.

iOS is popular, so there ought to be plenty of developers out there in the long tail. Maybe that's the real problem: Most developers are trying to grab a little tiny piece of the pie with a niche side-project, so they don't have the same perspective as someone who has employees and a big marketing budget sunk into their business.

If this supposition is correct, you'll see the same dynamic with other walled gardens from Microsoft and Google and whomever else gets into the "curated app store" business.