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It's actually quite the opposite. It became easier to create apps for Apple platforms, Apple also reduced the commission to 15% for small businesses.
The reality is that asking people to vote with their wallets does not work. But this specific case is even worse, because it's not possible to "vote with your wallet" to begin with.
The specific things the blog post notes are "how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store and in-app purchases, how awful Xcode is as a development environment"
So let's say you want to build a mobile app that actually reaches people. There's a duopoly, so you have to support Android and iOS. What are your options for "voting with your wallet" then? There's nothing you can buy that lets you reach iOS with your app without using Apple's ecosystem.
"Voting with your wallet" is what people tell you to do if they don't want you to do the things that actually work, which, in this case, is regulation. We have two companies controlling both viable mobile platforms. There is nowhere else to go for 99.9% of people. You can have a billion dollars, and you still can't "vote with your wallet." You're still going to own either an iPhone or an Android phone, and support both if you want to publish an app.
The obvious answer is that the two companies that control these platforms need to be regulated. Apple can play dumb if it's only Europe, but even so, the cracks are starting to show (e.g. Apple's recent copy/paste interoperability announcement). If the US joined in, the dam would break.
It created a tech environment where there is no money in good (as in good intent, socially responsible, user-focused) tech. Everyone expects good software (in the social/moral sense of good) to be free.
So we get an environment where the good people have no economic forcing function and no resources, and the exploiters have a business model.
We should not be surprised at what happened next.
You get what you incentivize. Always. We got what we incentivized.
The EU shows that regular voting is also an option.
What alternatives are there to Apple hardware that people like this Theo person would use?
Voting with your wallet doesn't work usually, because your wallet isn't big enough. Vote with your vote! Our system is dysfunctional in the united states, but if you look at the political unity behind something like blocking datacenter construction and how much of a headache it's causing for big tech, it's clear we still can have an effect. Most of the problem with big tech are solvable through existing anti-trust in…
> Vote with your vote!
My wallet is bigger than average. My vote is not.
Of course in neither case are they big enough to make much of a difference by themselves.
I'm not here to bash Linux, Android, Apple, or Windows. I like windows (10 at least) better than OSX or any distro for desktop use. I like iPhone better than Android.
Voting with my wallet just means I'm not as happy as what I currently have chosen.
What we need is to vote for standards. A floor that no product must fall below. Markets are useful when competition can actually discipline companies. When market forces aren't enough to make competitive products, other forces must pick up the slack.