“App Store Monopoly” Discussion

Well, it certainly didn’t take long for an alternative App Store to start doing what I’d feared to the point of prophecy. Trading on Apple’s reputation to lie, mislead, and trick customers. And it’ll be Apple who takes the reputational hit, and Apple who the EU will complain about for not doing enough to safeguard users when this all goes belly up, which is only a matter of when, not if.

2 Likes

They shouldn’t be allowed to claim that Apple approved the app, as that is misleading.

However, on safeguarding - is it not possible for parental controls to be used to prevent children from installing 3rd party app stores? If parents want to shield their children from porn they’re going to have to be engaging with parental controls anyway as it’s obviously trivially easy to access porn with just a web browser.

Well that’s the dilemma, isn’t it? The answer is yes, of course, for now. But the EU keep chipping those safeguards away because they’re not satisfied with Apple having safeguards at all, at least not as standard by default, and the third parties are very invested in convincing to you turn those safeguards off, even for your kids, without providing similar protections. And they’re putting Apple’s reputation, not their own, for safeguarding you on the line in order to do it.

If a third party store can claim their apps are Apple-approved, with no blow back, which as misleading as it is, is technically correct because Apple has to notarise apps on third party stores in order for the device to run them at all. They’re Apple-approved in the sense that the EU has forced them to approve it, not that they endorse it, which it’s clearly framed to be construed.

If your kid wants to play Fortnite (and likely many other games if Epic deploy their same anti-competitive anti-consumer practices they use on PC) on their iPad, you’re going to need to bypass those safeguards on your kids devices, too. At that point, all bets are off.

2 Likes

A pretty balanced take from Jason Snell (as usual).

So which is it? Is notarization a tool Apple can use to bypass all of Europe’s regulations of Apple whenever it feels like preventing users from running MacPaint on an iPad? Or is it something out of Apple’s hands? If Apple chose to exercise its notarization powers to kill the UTM and Mini vMac emulators, but then let Hot Tub through… doesn’t AltStore have a point? It’s hard for Apple to argue its hands are tied if it’s used those hands in the recent past. (I’ve contacted Apple’s PR representatives and asked if they can explain the disparity in policies to me, and I’ll update this story if they reply.)

In the grand scheme, I don’t think people need protecting from porn apps. This isn’t anything that isn’t very easily available on the web already.

As a Dad of three kids, it’s my responsibility to monitor what my kids do on their iPads and keep them safe. It’s obviously great for Apple/Google to build tools to help with this, but that doesn’t mean they have to activelty ban everything (obviously they can do what they want on their own stores!).

2 Likes

Maybe Trump’s bull in a China shop bravado isn’t what  actually needs!

2 Likes

Well this is what happens with tit for tat politicking. They each escalate until they both reach a mutually beneficial agreement and walk it all back. Going by his last term, this is the one thing Trump actually really excelled at.

The difference between China and the EU is who moved first and who is responding retaliatory. Unlike China, the EU has no pieces left to play in this respect. They already played them with no recourse from the past administration.

Not true, both sides have lots of things they could potentially do.

For instance, the EU has a “anti-coercion instrument”.

You must have missed where I stated in this respect referring to retaliating with a similar looming threat of anti-trust measures (the sort of stuff that will get the corporations lobbying back in the US), which that wouldn’t be.

Of course there are other things they could do, but if they escalate that tit for tat politicking any further than what they’ve started, I think it ultimately harms EU citizens far more than it does the US. On the bright side, if Starmer is any good at his job, it’ll be great 5 years for the UK.