Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers

It's really the most interesting thing I read in this screed, the rest of which seemed to be clueless BS like, "changes to App Store policies that will improve the state of the internet."

No. Unlike Google, Meta, and Amazon, Apple is not a gatekeeper to the Internet. They are the gatekeeper to one thing: their own app store. It's tiresome to hear the same anti-"big-tech" hysteria aimed at Apple. They aren't a monopoly, period.

But back to this: "The App Store policies hurt privacy"

No, they don't. The plaintiff bases this admittedly novel whine on the fact that Google and its ilk make money on things other than their software. So by that logic, every company that doesn't conduct business through its app hurts every company that does. Give us a break.

Leaving a region means they would give up market share, investments and a lot of staff. This is huge. It's not just about quarterly profit, even if it might sometimes feel like it is.

Presumably, before they take such a drastic measure, they would first spend massive amounts on lobbying, which would most likely succeed.

The entire business model that monetises user data, where the actual customer is the advertiser, users do not vote with their wallets, and honest competition is impossible because no one can compete with free, should simply not exist and maybe regulated against—especially in social media, where it incentivises algorithms to push aggravating content in the name of engagement and ad views.

Whether Apple should be regulated into reducing the fees they charge for access to their hardware and software ecosystem (the ecosystem they unarguably did a pretty stellar job at) is a debatable matter of its own, but it doesn’t strike me as addressing the issue of ad-supported business and how it messes with the way the market is supposed to work.

It is true that platform fee means this distorted business model is unfairly favoured. However, this is just an extension of the business based on ad/data mining (especially social media) being generally unfair in so many ways, and even with zero platform fees that business won’t stop being unfair and won’t be seriously challenged. To reiterate, no one can honestly compete with free; fee reduction merely tweaks the formula from “free vs. $X” to “free vs. slightly less than $X”.

Furthermore, there is the obvious issue that even if an app or service is paid, it can still be additionally monetising user data. Reducing fees will only favour this doubly shady business.

Perhaps what could actually move the needle a bit and make this model less attractive is if walled gardens somehow found a way charge a big fat fee off the ad/data mining revenue, in conjunction with appropriately reducing fees for regular sales of B2C apps and services. Could this be technically possible without walled gardens additionally owning ad exchanges (which might be a can of worms that shouldn’t be opened)?

Not related directly and not related to subscription — a recent case of Apple’s anticompetitive and user hostile policies is Apple essentially locking down email push notifications and essentially forcing everyone to use fetch. They had given a way via some signing and now they just shut it down or it broke and they didn’t fix it. Now if every mail provider have their own app then they can circumvent via some shenanigans of non mail push notifications and then fetch mail or some circus. My mail provider doesn’t have their own app so I am stuck with third party apps where push stopped working.

We can play technical gymnastics around this but this just sucks!

I 100% agree with this. Apple should be allowed to put whatever restrictions they want on apps in the App Store.

The problem is they don't allow apps to come from anywhere else, this is the core of the issue and what everything eventually comes down to.

Make it possible for users to control their own app installation sources on the hardware they own, show them what is happening when they do so, that they are replacing Apple as the source of trust with the developers of the app marketplace or app they are installing, but only do it once, it can't become a nag.

If they do that, then whenever anyone complains about App Store rules Apple can just tell them to do everything themselves instead, no APNS, no convenient installation from a pre-installed App Store, no seal of approval from a partner the user trusts, no free hosting, no infrastructure for app updates, etc.