But the question on my mind is: what precedent are we setting by legally mandating what a corporation can do on a platform they solely built? And are we pulling up the ladder after the incumbents have climbed it?

It's one thing to mandate how much pollution a factory may leak into a shared water supply. But the Apple app store is not a utility or natural resource. Apple built it from nothing and they're its sole owner. If it's a crappy experience, the solution to me still seems to be to migrate to a competitor (I'm toying with the idea of trading my Galaxy for a Librem 5).

There seems to be a mentality that megacorps have to have their hand held to not be public menaces, but by doing this my fear is we fortify Goliath rather than giving David a shot to kill him. The main reason I see this hasn't happened yet is that we've let the giants get away with corporate murder (e.g. Facebook's acquisition of both Instagram and WhatsApp), not because innovation is dead.

And national regulation is a pretty patchwork solution anyway to corporations that can (and sometimes do) go toe-to-toe with national governments.

I'd go one step further and suggest that neither Apple nor Google are good stewards of the mobile app distribution market, either.

Since the article you posted, I’ve uncovered a lot more about the prevalence of fraudulent apps on the App Store: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/21/22385859/apple-app-store-...

On the PC I have a mail app that turned into a subscription service and there are downsides. I have a lifetime license and get all the updates because I bought it before it went subscription based.

Now it feels like there’s a relentless push for more features every month to justify the subscription. Every month there’s some stupid update that does something I don’t need or want.

And the subscription costs 3x what I pay for my mailbox at Zoho. Sorry, but your stupid email client isn’t worth more than what my email provider charges me.

I won’t say the name because I think they’re a smaller company and they made good on all the lifetime licenses they sold afaik.

I'm torn on this. Of course I prefer to pay once for software but that's not really realistic in today's world where iOS (or Android) development is rarely "Write once, post online, walk away". It's an ongoing process and there aren't very many apps out there that are "done" (even the big players). I understand that my Drafts subscription goes to pay the developer on an ongoing basis to support the product and add new features.

compared to Android, though? far far better, Google literally doesn't even try to police that sort of stuff, they just list it all anyway and take their cut, when this stuff comes to light Apple delists it but Google is perfectly satisfied to keep raking in their cut. That's the difference.