Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store

And not only these pro-platform votes, look at all the negative discussion that happens here around university. In every single academic thread, where academic principles oppose big tech, the most upvoted threads are those that dismiss CS education, the university research system, the professors and humanities, while upvoting the "I dropped out of college" stories.

Big tech has done a lot of good, in elevating programmer salaries, and some companies contributing to a lot of open source. But walled gardens and subscriptions and censorship are money makers prized by capitalism. So they are always trying to "kill" the web, "boring" standards like email and XMPP, open research, and self-distributed software.

No, but it may mean some apps will use different payment prompts & systems, different cancellation systems for subscriptions, have different return policies, and so on, and it may mean that sometimes an app I want requires me to either go sign up on another app store or else not use the app, while right now 100% of apps on the platform are on one store, so that is never an issue. If I want to deal with that mental overhead and risk I can go use my PC. I have options if I want that experience. I don't on my phone and tablets.

> Are you arguing having firefox and ublock on iphone will suddenly make it more pleasant to browse the web and you don't like it? I am sure you are not.

Effectively every site works alright in Safari. It has to. It might not anymore if Google can banner-ad enough of the iOS ecosystem onto Chrome using their own renderer instead of Webkit.

My kindergartener's school iPad won't come with some cheaply-made app marketed to schools that contains an entire web engine (makes cross-platform easier, don't you know) that has a bug that lets it access the open web, bypassing the OS web controls. It can't, because if it uses a webview it has to use Webkit, which obeys the OS settings. That's a good thing.

For that matter half the apps on the app store aren't the mobile equivalent of Electron, shipping with an entire browser on board, for the same reason of developer convenience, wasting my disk space and killing my battery, because they're simply not allowed to do that. Again, good thing. I don't want to have to try to figure out the damn stack an app was built on before clicking "buy". It's bad enough they let React Native and Phonegap and such through the review process. I wish they didn't.

I don't know how it's so hard to understand that the locking down is a feature to many users. I want more devices that do that. Everyone worries about some dark future of only locked-down devices but here I am annoyed that there's a monopoly on those, while I've got a ton of options for my other computing needs. If I want a safe, low-maintenance, but still highly-capable machine for some non-tech-nerd in my life, which they'll be able to use pretty well totally independently, I have one option. That sucks.

This is probably the most important question: what is fair in a world where there are technological platform providers that are essentially creating two-sided markets of vast size and value? If the platform provider is in a dominant position, their actions or inaction could significantly harm participants in the market. Should they then be permitted to impose their own terms and charges on one or both sides of that market arbitrarily, or should there be some form of regulatory intervention in the interests of the participants in the market (from either side)? And to what extent should competition in whatever form be a factor in this?

There are many examples of harm where a single platform has a kind of quasi-monopoly and/or quasi-monopsony status. Aside from the current topic, consider Google's dominance of web search, and the corresponding effects it can have on web developers, advertisers and searchers. Other online marketplace services might qualify as well if they have come to dominate their niche. Then we have the manufacturers of many other types of device, such as cars or smart home control systems, which are also relatively high value purchases and "sticky", but where clearly there will be an ecosystem building up around them. It may not be in the interests of either the purchaser or those who would provide related products or services to be locked into whatever arrangements the manufacturer wants to impose.

We already have precedent for overriding the wishes of manufacturers in some instances in order to protect more vulnerable parties to the arrangements. For example, various regulatory authorities have acted to prevent car manufacturers from restricting their vehicles in such a way that only approved dealers can repair or service them, and of course there is the wider "right to repair" movement that is based on a similar principle.

But as ever, the law has not necessarily kept pace with the rapid evolution of technologies, and even if certain actions may be legal today as a result, that doesn't necessarily mean they should remain so.

> and

> B) The option to install apps from a 3rd party source would immediately mean that consumers all jump ship from Apple's official store and there would be no incentive for companies to release apps on the official store, and security on the device would be ruined forever.

> Both of those arguments can't be true at the same time. If you're providing a service that consumers want, you don't have to force them into it. If forcing consumers not to sideload apps is the only reason why consumers use Apple's store, then maybe that's a good sign that consumers don't want what Apple is providing.

The reason this looks like a contradiction is because it's not the actual position.

Mine, at least, is that 1) yes to A, and I'm not speculating, I personally feel that way as an iOS user, but then 2) no, on B: the concern isn't that users will jump ship from the App Store (I don't care, why would I?) but that developers will (and that I care about).