The value proposition of iOS is that the app store is the place to go, and that my experience will be seamless. I want a centralised place to manage my subscriptions. Here's an example:
I subscribed to NYT Cooking in the web a few years back. I went to cancel only to find out that I have to phone them. If I subscribed on an app store it would have been one click and done. I'm actually still subscribed to it.
Why is your choice more important than my choice?
This won't be a choice for users, this will be a choice for large developers.
The larger point is this: in a free market, if you have a bad experience with a product (like NYT Cooking in your example), you can bring your business elsewhere. That's how it works, and that's what Apple is interfering with.
They explicitly carved out their own market by making it a tightly integrated walled garden that's closed to outside integration, it seems hypocritical to now claim that users are free to leave at any time. They're not and that's by design.
I don't want the Meta store where Meta decide what level of API access their apps get). I explicitly choose the iOS ecosystem _because_ of this. If you want the alternative, you have a choice right now with Android. If this changes, then I _dont_ get a choice. Your choice removes my only option of a curated app marketplace in favour of a marketplace that will allow for billion dollar companies to set their own rules on how I interact with their apps, rather than me delegating that to one trusted gatekeeper.
Are you asking why we have antitrust laws?
> I don't want the Meta store where Meta decide what level of API access their apps get
And they shouldn't! Users should have full control over what data their apps can access, how often, with optional spoofing where it makes sense to stop apps from gating functionality behind invasive data collection. This should be an OS-level feature, not (poorly) enforced by the app store.
Apple's superficial review process isn't going to spot malicious abuses of your data unless it's plainly obvious.
> Your choice removes my only option of a curated app marketplace in favour of a marketplace that will allow for billion dollar companies to set their own rules on how I interact with their apps, rather than me delegating that to one trusted gatekeeper.
How so? You can continue using whichever marketplace you trust. Meanwhile your privacy and security should be technological, OS-level guarantees. You don't need Apple's app store to stop apps from stealing your banking information. You need a secure operating system (which iOS advertises itself to be) which employs sandboxing and that offers fine-grained permissions which users can freely grant, deny, or spoof.
you're putting words in my mouth here.
> How so? You can continue using whichever marketplace you trust.
No. I get to use whichever marketplace the publisher decides to use. Epic aren't going to publish on the App Store (see Fortnite on PC), Meta are going to publish on their own store. 37signals are going to use their own store. I currently can use a marketplace I trust. If iOS opens to allow other stores, then those stores either need to be curated by Apple or the store apps are sideloaded and have wider permissions. I don't want Meta's store with those permissions, I'm fine with using WhatsApp and not giving them my location.
Users do not care how much it costs a developer. They want it to be easy to see and cancel subscriptions all in one place. The web’s myriad of payment systems is the opposite of a good user experience, meant to only fatten the pockets of developers by making it difficult to cancel.
This is a ludicrous statement. The users are the ones paying for it.
If Melinda wants to use the Facebook app, but the Facebook app is only available on the Meta store, then Melina is forced to use the Meta store. This is not giving users choice. This is replacing one corp-backed store by multiple corp-backed stores. The user loses.
The only way how this would be a choice is if the same app, with the same basic functionality was available on all stores. Then the user would really have the choice which store to use. Or if there were alternative apps on different stores. Good luck with that given the current monopoly markets.
An "App Store", when it is not used as a rent-seeking choke-point, is a nothing-burger, it's a simple website to buy and download an app, yet you are trying to claim some great horror if this website was run by Meta not Apple. Please. It's nonsensical.
By the way, I couldn't care less if Meta has their own shop or not, and I don't see any horror in that, they decide how to best run their business, not me. But I take an issue with claims that Meta running their own exclusive show somehow creates more user choice (which is the direction the commenter I was replying to was heading towards)
It's such a bizarre belief that a product sold by Apple remains "their platform" once in the hands of a consumer. The only thing they still "own" is copyright IP. They sold a product. They don't get to legislate user actions. Their power over the device post sale, that they use to extract rent, is entirely artificial.
I mean, it's not that I would oppose this ideology in particular, it just sounds a bit radical. We'd have to change quit a lot of things for it to be feasible.