I genuinely respect a lot John Gruber, I listen to his podcast, read his website since more than 10 years, met him briefly twice and follow him on twitter. He have most of time some great moments of clarity.
what baffle me is his position on the market share.
I am not in the camp that root for the market share no matter what … indeed as we can see in the post pc market, demography of quality and developer revenue are more important than pure download/devices number. But here what shock me again and again since 3 years :
Apple will do just fine if its long-term position in the phone market settles in like its position in the PC market.
Apple will. But Developers and Users will not. look at the mac today : very few apps and vey few games, because dev struggle to make a living.
is that what Gruber want for iOS devices ?
Note that this kind of blurry and foggy vision is unfortunately quite common when you are the mindshare leader.

because it’s what gonna to happen (until Apple change the game again) once the app revenue will move to other platform, developers will follow. More developer means more apps and little by little a better quality. Not as good but good enough for the mass.
Android monthly store revenue is on the rise and dev earn now about 50% of what they could earn on iOS. Android devices (htc one mostly) are little by little approaching the build quality of an iPhone. they will reach the good enough state soon.
And this analogy with the mac is not accurate either, because the mac rely a lot on the web with a true compatible browser for all those web apps. In the app world that do not work that way and we will be force to run Android or Windows apps in an emulator like in the past … so it will be the mac before web apps.
from me : hey @gruber, remember the time where we had only a crappy browser and really few quality apps on the mac ? I was there and it was not pretty.
And we are heading right into it. And that’s a lesson from the past that Apple should have learned. I will still be there because I love simplicity and design but most of iOS Developers that sold out the WWDC will not be here in few years … along with their apps.
it will not happen this year as the Apple ecosystem is better than ever with millions of iDevices in the hand of real customers, but if the trend continue it will happen as this phenomenon was cast at the outset of iPhoneOS (no licensing vs install everywhere)
Until Apple change the game again … but until that disruptive force come again (mac,iPod, itunes, iPhone, iPad …) the ecosystem will loss lot of value for users and developers.