Yes, this is exactly my point. Consumers are going to get a worse experience so companies besides Apple can make more money.
That may or may not be a good thing—all I'm saying is consumers will get hurt.
Do you really believe that taxes just hurts company profits and doesn't hurt products used by the people?
Apple's odd choices for enforcement of the fee (like Patreon) do create a problem for many kinds of apps. I'm just hesitant to dismantle something that mostly works for most people without a very clear idea of what it is we'll end up with.
The endgame here from the perspective of the companies that are pushing for this is to arrive at a similar place to where we are with streaming services: they each want their own store where they will distribute their own apps without a middleman. That's great for the companies, but choosing to stay exclusively in the Apple ecosystem will necessarily be choosing to not use any apps from Epic, Meta, Adobe, Amazon, and whoever else thinks they're big enough to justify their own store.
It's going to be a disaster for app consumers on the same scale as unbundling Netflix was for streaming.
This is the reality on Apple’s own macOS.
This is a pretty weak boogeyman.
Remember that I choose Android for the flexibility. I like the wild west of the WWW. I'm here defending the interests of a group that isn't well represented on HN: Apple users who actually like having exactly one App Store that they can count on to look out for them and moderate what apps can and can't do.
We already have Wild West platforms. For a while we had one that was better regulated, and people flocked to it. Large companies are lobbying government to dismantle that platform for their own selfish interests, and you're cheering it on rather than just picking the ecosystem that already provides what you want.
If people can juggle getting weather in one app, videos in another, and banking in a third, they can “juggle” the hassle of a one time search to find where to purchase the game.
Because I’m happy to identify 100 media companies for every 1 that you identify that offers their content exclusively on their own streaming platform
They would fundamentally have to change how app stores work with Apple. Yes, things will change for everyone.