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Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

"I pay Apple to uphold this bar by any means necessary. "

I pay the electric company to have a store where only approved toasters and microwaves are sold so as to keep quality high!

I pay my car company to ensure that only approved tires, windows, audio, windshield wiper fluid can be used.

This logic is not working.

Apple, and ABC corp, and any other companies can have app stores.

If you want to shop at the 'absurdly high standards store' that's totally fine, but otherwise it's anti-competitive.

There's no reason 'Person A' can't send an app to 'Person B' if they want.

It works on Mac, Windows, Android, Linux and everywhere else.

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> I pay the electric company to have a store where only approved toasters and microwaves are sold so as to keep quality high! > I pay my car company to ensure that only approved tires, windows, audio, windshield wiper fluid can be used.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but where I live there is a tax-funded Safety and Chemicals Agency whose job is to keep dangerous and malicious physical products out of the market. There is no equivalent for software.

Well, now that I think of it, CERT is kind of similar.

The problem is that CERT can only react to problems after they have happened. For physical products, you first have to meet CE standards to even get to the market. You can give the the label to your own product if you want to take the risk, but unlike software there is an official barrier to entry. I'm not sure if it's even possible to develop similar standards for software.

Sure there is, its called a package repository. See Debian or Arch for some good examples.

They're specific to Linux distribution families, so they don't really apply to those who are running Android or iOS. Also, getting your app into repository isn't really easier than getting it into app store (see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMentorsFaq#How_do_I_get_a_spon...) and good luck if you're trying to make money from the app.

> getting your app into repository isn't really easier than getting it into app store ... and good luck if you're trying to make money from the app.

Good. That's why the quality is so high.

Pro monopolist app store people are like Chinese citizens so happy with the CCP 'because stability'. It's bizarre.

Android, Mac, Windows, Linux are reasonably safe platforms, there's zero reason why people can't chose to download the software they want.

Apple's 'it's the security' line is the most obvious giant lie, it's there to protect their control over the platform and that's that.

The difference is that you can buy a PinePhone and run whatever you want on it, but CCP doesn't offer a similar choice.

I thought the original subject was that there's too much gatekeeping. Or is there just double standard, so that gatekeeping is good for Linux distros and bad for commercial app stores?

Apps are not a risk to your health.

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