Apple's loss. It's a great game.
... But also, Apple's space to lose in.
... But also, Apple's space to lose in.
Imagine having to ID yourself to be allowed to install and use privacy software. What the actual fuck? "Privacy is a human right" is about as sincere as "don't be evil" these days.
Apple is slowly boiling the frog; every year there are more APIs in the OS that you can't use unless you are distributing via the MAS, which demands a phone number for an Apple ID even to download free apps.
I wish the FTC would come down hard on them, but unfortunately Apple has too much money and is too important of a bargaining chip in the coming Chinese trade war.
People don't want a computer or smartphone, they want the things those devices afford them.
From a security perspective, the much vaunted "general purpose computing" reduces to "arbitrary code execution". It's very dangerous, and without some sort of allowlist-based restriction on what may be run on the average consumer's hardware, it becomes a playground for hackers, thieves, and malicious state actors.
The era of general purpose computing with consumer hardware is dead. Millions of customers are delighted with their restricted devices. Stop whining and move on with your lives, people.
They're entitled to it, I say. Hell, I even think other companies are entitled to make it for them.
What they cannot do is turn this layer of abstraction into an excuse for infinite profitability. People don't want coffee makers, they want coffee! That doesn't mean Keurig is necessarily allowed to stop other people from selling pods, though. Especially if they become the primary way that people get their coffee. We have a democratically controlled legal system that holds these people in check - particularly when the market doesn't behave. You can still be right here, but if Apple is taking advantage of this situation to fleece people beyond what can be considered reasonable, then we have to litigate them regardless. Hopefully in the future, Apple finds a way to prioritize things like security while also respecting the user's choice and agency.
It's time for armchair analysts and AAPL investors to take a hike. Some of us want Apple to succeed regardless of their monopolistic intent, and helping them requires us to prune their ugliest branches. We staved off half a decade of change with this "free market will fix things" mantra, and nothing improved. If Apple won't do what's right, then we'll be forced to.
The market is "computers" and if Apple tightens its grip too far, they run people off to another solution. Everything else is economics as far as the American system is concerned.
The American system led us to a situation where Apple's global presence is exploitative. If Apple wants to get increasingly petty with their compliance, global regulators are apt to get increasingly petty with their regulation. Considering how Apple shrugged off Dutch regulators, it shouldn't surprise people when EU commissions move in with bigger demands. If those demands are unreasonable, then maybe Apple can run off to another market.
Nobody will stop you from framing this as a free market issue, but it's a comically small piece of the puzzle.
This leaves us with your previous observaation
> If Apple won't do what's right, then we'll be forced to.
And I agree. And in a (mostly) free-market system structure like the US, the solution is obvious... There's a reason I haven't used Apple as my primary compute platform for approximately 15 years.
Without a GP computer? That's a pretty large ask on a developer's site.