> Windows. Full of spyware and garbage, but it's where critical apps were, so users had to go in turn.
Windows is full of spyware and garbage because of path dependence. Software direct from the developer was the way it was for MS-DOS in the 1980s, Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility, so it's still the same way today. And since that's the default way of getting Windows software, users don't exercise caution for software distributed in that way, and then they get spyware and garbage.
Compare this to Linux, where you have a functioning package manager that has the large majority of the software you'll ever need, even though it has no monopoly at all and nothing stops you from installing software another way. But since that's then unusual, it raises a red flag if something has to be installed that way, so you don't have a huge malware problem because malware relies on people being credulous and running on autopilot.
You're also confusing the platform with the store. Many people need Windows because it's the only decent implementation of the Windows APIs. If you want to play games, good luck getting them to run on macOS. So you need Windows, but you don't inherently need to download games from random shady websites, because you can use Steam. Meanwhile there is now WSL, which allows you to install software through the Linux package managers. And now Microsoft is only taking a 5% cut for apps in its store instead of Apple's 30%, which is causing more things to use it even though it doesn't have a monopoly on Windows. So even there the market is at work solving the problem.
> But "monopolies" are everywhere in software, and necessarily so because nobody has come up with a better general way to solve the resource allocation problem for information generation. That's what copyright is. If someone's work depends on specific proprietary applications, those can well be more important then anything else. One way to counter that is other monopolies. This has happened repeatedly in the last few decades.
Copyright isn't inherently a monopoly in the market sense. Winzip and 7-zip each have a copyright "monopoly" on their own code, but they don't have a monopoly on zip programs because they compete with each other along with Winrar, gzip, bzip2, etc.
Facebook is more or less a monopoly, but that isn't from copyright, it's from the network effect, and from a single company owning the network instead of using open standards and protocols. This is a classic case for some kind of antitrust action to either break them up or require adversarial interoperability. And nothing about it is inherent -- email is a network in the same class as Facebook but nobody has a monopoly on it because it's federated.
Countering monopolies with other monopolies is some kind of feudalistic dystopia.
> A walled garden has always been an extremely explicit part of the iOS package. Why shouldn't iOS users be able to actively choose that?
They can choose that. Even if other stores exist, you don't have to use them. Nobody ever died from not installing the Facebook app. Use the website, or quit Facebook. Then, when everybody does that, Facebook will have to go crawling back to Apple, or some other store the users are willing to trust.
Meanwhile, if so few people do that that Facebook can fob them all off, that shows how many people actually want the "walled garden" -- so few that it doesn't actually work unless you rope in huge numbers of unwilling participants.
It's also evidence that Facebook could already do that. If their app was so important it could get people to switch to an untrustworthy store then it could also get a lot of people to switch to another platform. Which gives them leverage over Apple, which lets them get away with privacy-invasive things like uploading your contacts to Facebook without getting kicked out.
And in either case, the better solution is to address the Facebook monopoly and the Apple monopoly, rather than neither of them.
> Multiple stores would dilute the power of any given store, which would favor the power of developers. That is what you are directly arguing for.
Multiple stores would dilute the power of any given store, which would favor the power of developers and users. Which is what I am directly arguing for.
The amount of power developers give up to Apple is not inherently less than the amount of power users give up to Apple. On top of that, not everything the developers lose to Apple is a gain to the users, some of it is only a gain to Apple. But everything the users lose to Apple is a loss to the users, and some of the things the developers lose are also a loss to the users. This is not a net favorable arrangement to anybody but Apple.
> Under the current system, they can either comply with restrictions, or give up on the entire iOS market. On your suggestion, they can do as they wish and users that want to use them will be forced to go along with it.
The only difference here is the number of people who will not install the app unless it is in Apple's store. If you give people a choice, that number may go down, but that doesn't mean it's still not high enough to force the developer's hand, or that if it isn't it still would be even at the level of the entire iOS market. Meanwhile if you granted Apple a total monopoly over all apps on all platforms then the number would go up, but the reasons that isn't worth the cost are the same reasons it isn't in the current case. The costs of giving them that much power exceed the benefits, and the problems you want to solve can be solved in a different way.
> It's very strange how you completely ignore that there are all sorts of powerful actors who can command audiences independently of platform to one degree or another.
I'm not ignoring them, I'm saying apply antitrust enforcement to them too, so that they too are subject to competitive pressure and can't do that anymore.
> Apple has interests, and I have interests. To the extent our interests align there is every possibility for a win-win, that is the market functioning at its best.
A monopoly isn't a market. Having a shared interest with a monopolist is luck, not market forces, and meanwhile you're then still facing an adversarial monopolist on all your other interests.
> Every alternate store must resist bad requirements, or else every app & service must be fully substitutable.
You're assuming the same app can't be in more than one store at the same time, or move to whichever one will resist government pressure. The thing you substitute isn't the app, it's the store.
> Because if there are apps that users must use, or that are so valuable that there are powerful incentives to put up with a significant amount of downside, then they themselves can drive stores if there are options not the other way around.
We're talking about things subject to government pressure. If you have a podcast app that lets the user receive arbitrary podcasts including ones China doesn't want you to hear, that doesn't mean you have an important monopoly on podcasting -- they banned more than one app. Another store that accepts those apps isn't beholden to them, if anything it's the other way around. The apps need the store that will resist pressure more than the store needs those apps.
> Apple's centralized power and incentives also gave them a powerful reason and position to tell the FBI to fuck off.
That didn't really have anything to do with centralization -- it didn't even really have anything to do with apps. That was Apple, as a hardware manufacturer with root keys that they maybe ought not to have had to begin with, refusing to use them to remotely unlock somebody's phone.
They couldn't have even been asked to do that if they hadn't retained for themselves the power to push code to your phone without your permission, and having multiple stores wouldn't inherently require any of the others to be able to do that. It's completely possible to have stores that only install new code at the user's instruction, which requires the user to first unlock their phone, no matter how may stores there are.