Apple defined ICE as a "protected class" in blocking anti-ICE apps

You can't just do this. If you assume 1=2 all of math falls apart, and the same is true when you assume obviously un-true facts: the reason all of this matters at all is only because Apple wants to ban this kind of software from being native AT ALL, not merely because they don't want to themselves distribute something they dislike. I'd happily stand up to defend their right to do the latter if-and-only-if they stop doing the former, and you can't separate these two issues.

> ...the anti-ICE app wants in the App Store because of the marketing and ease of distribution it enables...

And so like, here: I don't care if the app doesn't get to be in the App Store, and I don't care if it gets "marketing" or "ease of distribution" from Apple. I do care that it gets to be a native app. I deeply deeply care about that.

(BTW, the App Store in fact DOES NOT provide marketing, and if you ever go to any developer conference that focuses on mobile apps that's extremely common knowledge. Except in extremely narrow circumstances, users do not discover apps inside the App Store: they discover apps from advertisements, word of mouth / viral features, and searching for things on Google. The search engine inside of the App Store is pitiful and, to the extent to which it works at all, often surfaces your competitor's app before yours.)

> Why is this situation better for the anti-ICE app than just being a web app? This should be a web app, right? It shouldn't really rely on any native capabilities.

I mean, in a perfect world, this app wouldn't be a web app, because a web app makes it really easy to go to the servers and shut it down, allows for a network choke-point to discover its users by traffic analysis, and generally harass (whether legally or illegally) the people who are paying for the service to exist.

What you want here is a peer-to-peer service, which requires a native app that you can download from numerous sources, one that is published anonymously, one which uses DHTs to store information and which builds on a platform capable of hidden services... and yet you also want to have things like push notifications (possible from native apps using local notifications that are surfaced after background updates).

Like, I dunno: this entire discussion is always so broken as it relies on so many assumptions made by people about what actually should happen... but every single one of these assumptions is buying into a narrative frame that Apple themselves have set through the years by choosing what to cripple in their quest to own app distribution.

In case of the duopoly, when the consumers have no practical choice of the platform, this should be illegal, too.

> Yet we are supposed to let people in without documentation? Without background checks? What kind of insanity is that.

Let me tell you that, in my experience, the US very much enforces all these requirements, to the point where foreigners have to pay the US government hundreds of dollars for the _chance_ of getting a temporary visa. And again, ICE has nothing to do with the process.