Point is, those codecs don't need to exist. What can they do that free ones can't? But since some might actually make such exact conclusion, Qualcomm try to go after free ones as a classic racketeer.
Well, I don’t know anything about these codecs but the article says that they are widely recognized as superior. Are you countering that?
If they are superior and some people are willing to pay for that, I guess that is why they exist. Charging for them seems perfectly fine as long as they are not abusively using some form of leverage to do so.
Giving away the encoder side seems smart but it also seems to indicate that the demand is not great enough for them to easily monetize both sides. It may all go Open Source eventually.
AptX and its HD version (which is basically the same algorithm configured with a different set of parameters) are very simple compared to e.g. AAC. If I remember correctly, aptX was initially designed as a computationally efficient ADPCM-based telephony codec. It still is, but it's being marketed as "audiophile-grade" nowadays. As to why it's still popular: SBC was indeed suffering from unnecessarily low bitrates and noticeable low-pass filtering, so aptX did sound nicer than many SBC implementations. But I guess "sounds better than broken SBC" doesn't sell as much as "indistinguishable* from high resolution audio".
