If it's not done on the basis of jurisdiction, then laws about what constitutes illegal content in Germany or China or United States applies to everyone.
Taking the stance of "we're not going to follow any laws and publish everything" puts the companies in very difficult places in those countries as publishers of the content.
They’re welcome to curate a store if they want to but installation and configuration of any 3rd party software, freely, without attestation mandates should be available. Also, Apple introduced a very complex process of fear mongering for the Alt Store in the EU - all that must go away in order to rectify the user’s right to own their device.
Or just.. make it easier to not be constrained to app stores. I realize losing that sweet, sweet 30% fee on every transaction hurts their wallet but I think my $1000 phone should be mine to freely install things on.
*and hurts design and development of their products... which you bought... because you're complaining about it.
I get in trouble for this a lot, but didn't you as a consumer know what you were getting into? I know I did when I bought into the apple ecosystem.
What's the actual argument? Apple doesn't have a monopoly on smartphones, computers or applications. This boils down to. I use their products by choice, but I want the government to force them to change. Their platform their rules. idk why this is controversial.
It's not called a duopoly for no reason, both Apple and Google have very similar policies and if there's any competition, I'm not seeing it.
You can use Apple which controls everything you are allowed to see and do on your phone or you can chose Google which ... controls everything you are allowed to see and do on your phone.
And as a developer, both fees are exactly the same (what a coincidence!)
The duopoly comes about from a few things forcing it.
There's the "it took a while to build it." iOS and android had decades of time to get to where they are now and centuries of developer hours put into writing it. That makes it challenging for others to get in. It isn't impossible, but it's really challenging. For the company, it's likely a loss for a long while before it becomes a possibility of not being a loss. The windows phone was being worked on for 3 years before the iPhone was released and wasn't released for another 3 years... and wasn't exactly a success.
Next is the licensing of the modems for the phone spectrum. That takes FCC approval in the US and isn't something that random companies do without good reason. Part of that licensing is the requirement that it is locked down sufficiently that the user can't do malicious things on the radio spectrum with the device... and that tends to go against many of the open source ideals. It's a preemptive Tivoization of the device.
Assuming that those two parts are down, the next challenge is to make it a tool that you'd use in place of an iPhone or an android phone. Things like holding PCI data. That again makes it difficult to do. Persuading a bank that the device can act as a payment card and that the authorization is sufficient to avoid fraud from either the apps on the device or the user being able to inject other payment cards that they don't own into the device.
I'd love to see an iPod touch like device (non phone) that allows me to run apps or develop my own and build up an ecosystem and demonstrate that trusting it is feasible... but so far I haven't seen many that have lasted beyond kickstarter money running out. I've got a Remarkable ... which isn't exactly small (or cheap). I'd like to see more things like that in other form factors that allow me to do things with it akin to https://developer.remarkable.com
> That makes it challenging for others to get in. It isn't impossible, but it's really challenging.
Huawei made Harmony OS smartphones in 2 years. That said, they were uniquely motivated by the Google Mobile Services ban, Chinese state support, and likely had set the groundworks for such a transition much earlier.
> Reports surrounding an in-house operating system being developed by Huawei date back as far as 2012 in R&D stages with HarmonyOS NEXT system stack going back as early as 2015.
It wasn't green field to release in two years and likely had almost a decade of prep. It probably got additional resources with the Google Mobile Services ban... but even without that it would likely have shown up within the next few years.
One of the classic roles of the government is to prevent certain unfair business setups. For instance, providers of a service aren't supposed to have agreements to not compete and carve off markets from each other. Likewise price fixing is prohibited.
Apple already lost here when it attempted to prevent people from even linking to other payment platforms. That was "their platform" until it wasn't, thanks to a court.
Giving them exclusive control to police speech - legal speech - without an opt out that doesn't involve thousands of dollars of loss is also "part of their platform" today.
I actually disagree with the ICEBlock app.. but that's for the courts to decide if it's legal, not a private company.
At least in the US, every single app maker can link out of an app and accept payments. But most still don’t.
You know why? It came out in the Epic Store that 90%+ of App Store revenue comes from pay to win games, coins, and loot boxes. Game developers love to have direct access to whale’s wallets.
Taking the stance of "we're not going to follow any laws and publish everything" puts the companies in very difficult places in those countries as publishers of the content.