> If you don’t think Games are a distinct category then you must concede that streaming games means streaming apps of all kinds.
Well, but this is the rub: Apple does allow virtual desktop streaming on the app store. Streaming an app is allowed, as long as the user clicks on an icon on a virtual desktop. Can we think of a consumer-relevant difference between streaming a game and booting up a game by clicking on an icon on a virtual desktop? Is it relevant enough that one of those two things should be banned?
The only difference that seems credible to me is that the distinction allows Apple to directly target Google Stadia and Microsoft.
> They can bypass age restrictions, phish, be scams, collect credit card numbers, do social engineering, promote hate etc.
But is this a distinction that it's reasonable to think that Apple actually cares about? You can buy illicit ebooks on an Apple platform as long as Apple gets a 30% cut from the purchase screen. Apple isn't filtering the content of 3rd-party digital purchases.
And if the distinction that we're drawing is, "we need to make sure that we're blocking hate speech", make a policy that streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Video, and Google Stadia can't make hate speech available. Given what we know about Apple's current policies, is a ban on games the type of thing you would expect from an app store worried about hate speech, or would you expect something direct that actually targeted the real problem?
> your argument seems to be that Apple shouldn’t be able to discriminate based on what apps do.
I don't think I'm claiming anything quite that broad. I'm arguing that if discrimination exists only to target a specific market, and if the company involved is one half of a duopoly, then we should consider antitrust implications.
There are technical reasons to restrict what apps can do: for example, limitations around the platform and hardware. There are also consumer-facing reasons to restrict what apps can do, to block malware, spyware, and security risks. There are even moral reasons to restrict what apps can do, to block hate speech, or to make safe spaces for younger users.
The distinction between a game and movie for an entirely off-device experience doesn't fit any of those reasons. There's no moral reason to treat games differently than movies; if you were worried about morals you'd create a general policy against hate speech that applied to all 3rd-party content. There's no technical reason; the engineering resources to support both use-cases are exactly the same. And there's no consumer-facing reason; remote applications are all sandboxed from the user's phone.
The only reason to choose that specific distinction -- games vs videos vs ebooks vs applications -- is because of what companies are involved in each market. We can theoretically imagine a world where Apple might make a distinction there for non-malicious reasons, but the most logical, obvious explanation for those rules is that Apple isn't interested in blocking hate speech or phishing scams, it's interested in blocking markets. We know what it looks like when Apple gets interested in blocking hate speech or phishing scams or improving privacy, and generally it looks different than this.
To go back to the original analogy, I can come up with some tortured reasons why maybe consumers really care about the color of people's shirts (fashion is a giant industry after all), and I can say I want to create a shopping experience where everyone is dressed well and that maybe a solid red shirt might have bad words written on it, and obviously I can filter on clothing in general because I'm allowed to say that my customers can't be naked. These are all theoretically possible explanations for my policy, it's just that they're obviously lies. It's obvious that if I cared about people showing up naked, I'd target that specifically. It's obvious that in this scenario I'm coming up with the policy first, and then trying to justify it afterwards as if it's a neutral decision.
To flip your earlier incredulity back at you: do you really, honestly believe that if Amazon, Hulu, and other streaming services weren't essential apps for iOS, that Apple would still be looking at them right now and saying, "clearly video purchases should be treated differently than ebook purchases."? We can intuit something of Apple's motivation here.