I'm going to take a guess here and say the posts that were notorious enough so that you found them were all done by app developers with a heavy investment in the App Store, so they couldn't just ignore what happened, and chose to try to fix their problem with publicity.

To protect their investment, "bending over" may have been the most sensible, if painful, option.

If you're a new developer choosing whether to target Android, iOS, or both, your perspective may be different. But people won't care about your blog posts.

> What is striking is none (or I haven't come across one) of these articles end with the developer washing their hands off the App store and vowing never to develop another iOS app.

Probably because that's a foolish approach as a developer. If your app is worth a damn, then preventing it's use by potential customers simply because of your personal opinion is fairly inconsiderate. Should someone be deprived the use of an app simply because they bought a different phone then the one I approve of?

That's a hard line to take, I understand, and realize not everyone will agree with that. =) I just feel that from the customer perspective, the only thing that matters is the developer. And if the developer choose not to release on the platform I am using, then the developer is essentially telling me I do not matter.