Second, despite the claims of the president, the white house does not have the power to block TikTok or Bytedance from the public. The president can only block armed forces from installing apps on their owned devices.
Android is also problematic on that aspect, even Epic Games gave up on distributing Fortnite outside the Play Store.
If the most well known game in the world can't make it outside the Play Store, who could?
Whatever sweetheart deal Epic worked out with Google in the end doesn't discredit that they successfully sold hundreds of thousands of copies outside of the the Google Play store.
This argument also intentionally ignores the existence of the Amazon app store on Android.
They specifically state that they failed due to the constraints and had to back to the store.
> This argument also intentionally ignores the existence of the Amazon app store on Android.
Yeah sure, there's a few other minor stores but they are nowhere near the size of the Play Store.
Additionally we could compare to other markets, if you compare the number of companies which can host your website and the number of companies which can host your app, the numbers are going from hundreds of thousands to less than 10 for apps even by counting almost irrelevant stores.
Turns out, they don't need to. Due to the fact that most people do not exercise any real control over the devices they use to read most expression, all they have to do is be able to regulate trade between app publishers and the {App,Play} Store.
This is how the US government is presently engaging in censorship of apps published by ByteDance (and soon Tencent). They can prohibit Apple/Google from transacting with the publisher, and because Apple/Google control the phones of the end users, the end users are effectively prohibited from reading the content published by that publisher.
It's an end run around the constitution.