Hacker News Reader

Comment by bloblaw | Hacker News Reader

> They should create legislation to control access to all app stores to prevent this rent seeking

You have a lot of faith in 60+ year old (mostly tech-illiterate men) to fix technology they don't understand. Government isn't the solution to this problem. Developers leaving the app store is probably only what will get Apple to change.

View on HN

They did a decent job with credit cards eventually.

Developers leaving won't happen, Apple and Google will cut a deal with big guys (Netflix, Amazon) and ignore smaller players (even Epic in this case)

Sure they understand. Did you hear all of the insightful questions that the representatives asked Zuckerberg? Especially when they asked Zuckerburg about Twitter’s policies.

You have users who has iphones, and those users want you to develop an app. They can't switch phones. Buying a new phone is expensive. They use apps that only currently exist in iphone. There is sunk costs. Their social circle require them to use iphone. The phone was provided by the job and they can't use something else.

Should the developer spit in the face of those users and refuse to develop the app? No. They might not like apple. Might not support what apple is doing. The app might be horrible crippled and overpriced. Sadly the choice will still likely be to develop an app for the iphone because the small signal it would send to apple is microscopic compared to the major harm to your users.

Linus tech tips had a nice discussion around.

I have faith that politicians can task experts to come up with legislation. Politicians are of course not experts in all subject matters and one should not expect them to be.

Developers leave the app store for which alternative on iOS?

I think that's called regulatory capture when politicians task experts to come up with legislation.

They can legislate for example against app store exclusivity instead of legislating technical app store rules.

Compared to the entire set of countries, the US government is extraordinarily high-functioning, and this was all created by mostly 60+ tech-illiterate men.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com