App store bill sails out of Senate Judiciary Committee

Except that you can only do so after you know it is offending.

By then the app could've siphoned all of your data.

I blame consumers for the duopoly we have. I get that practically, it's a farce to call this choice we have real and significant but these marketplaces exist because of the demand. Making this duopoly more convenient for app-makers only kicks the can and further re-enforces the duopoly. In an ideal world, people would fund projects like the PinePhone or PostMarketOS, but our "solution" to the walled-garden is apparently to make it less painful but just as preeminent. Consumers should be smarter.

There are a lot of passionate people trying to make these alternative hardware and software marketplaces work, but passion is no replacement for genuine demand so supply is scant. Given the unfortunate historical trajectory, quality will always be wanting. So, I guess I'm against a practical solution that entrenches the status quo when there's an ideological solution that would make these poor options obsolete. I'm probably just holding my breath though.

So you're suggesting that either Google or Apple will just step aside?

And the point of this monopoly busting legislation was to create a bigger monopoly?

If anyone actually thinks we’re going to be in an objectively better spot in 2 years because of this bill, I encourage you to take a real good look around at the actual world we actually live in.

Things I guarantee you will see because of this: 1. You will have six different app stores on your phone. The Apple one, the Facebook one, the Google one, the Epic one, and at least two more, probably one from Disney and one from Spotify. 2. Those apps will absolutely not follow anything even close to App Store guidelines, and will wholesale be grabbing everything they can and exploiting every available opportunity to at best take your data and at worst add any kind of adware, malware, or anything else they can. 3. You thought payment dark patterns were bad Now? 4. Every goddamn app you want from every goddamn anything will be side-loaded. Some of these will be legit versions of the app you wanted.

You live in a world in which large predators want to devour you and small predators want to gnaw on you. You live in a world in which goddamn websites are running crypto-miners in your browser. You live in a world in which every company out there is aggressively hacking your dopamine circuits to try to get you to use their app more, and every company out there is grabbing every bit of data they can on you so they can sell it to whatever shady asshole’s willing to give them money for it. You live in a world where nation states are actively targeting you and everyone else around you from across the goddamn world. For fuck sake, you live in a world in which every entertainment studio out there is yanking their content from every other channel and demanding a subscription for them alone.

The App Store is an extractive tax on developers. It restricts user freedom. These things are true. But the goddamn naivety it takes to seriously think that the ability to side-load is going to make our actual lived day-to-day lives better instead of just hypercharging this dark forest hellscape we’ve invented for ourselves takes my breath away. Where the Hell have you people been Living for the last decade?

> a) Nothing is stopping you from charging people from outside the app e.g. your own web site. It's how Netflix works.

Most here are already familiar with Apple's 15-30% fee (requiring developers to raise prices by 17.6-42.9% to break even) for most app categories, which siphons money from developers who are smaller than Apple to entrench Apple's duopoly position.

Furthermore, even for free apps, Apple requires developers to pay the $99/year fee just to keep apps in the App Store. Without paying, the apps are removed. This already has a negative impact on the availability of free and open source apps on iOS, with an outsized effect on FOSS developers in areas with lower cost of living. For example, compare the huge selection of apps for Nextcloud features available to Android users via F-Droid (https://search.f-droid.org/?q=Nextcloud) to just Nextcloud (basic storage functions) and Nextcloud Talk on iOS.

> d) Nothing is stopping you from running a web server, creating funky projects etc. You are just not allowed to disseminate to others through the App Store.

That's a point in favor of the bill. Apple preventing entire categories of useful apps from entering iOS via the only accessible installation method for most users of average tech proficiency is evidence of consumer harm.

Nobody is making you install or purchase anything from outside the App Store if you don't want to, even after sideloading becomes an option in iOS. Sideloading is allowed in Android, and most users still install and purchase apps from the Play Store in regions where the Play Store is pre-installed.