> Today, consumers can choose trusted curation and full integration (iDevices), or non-curated and unbundled (countless brand + Android OS options).
Or option 3: curated and integrated by buying an Android phone that comes bundled with all kinds of Google applications.
The 3 major computing platform vendors Apple, Microsoft, and Google are 3 of the 4 largest corporations in the world by market cap. They are the corporate power with no counterbalance.
I don't have any skin in the game in terms of Apple anymore. I use Android these days, and I use F-Droid, and all the apps on it are FOSS and possible to audit. If privacy/security is a concern, the only winning move is not to play with closed source OS and firmware on devices.
Side-loading and installing from binary blobs is the counter-balancing choice: don't use any third-party app store, pick-and-choose what you run. Not to do any disservice to F-Droid, it's an excellent option, but only doing what you could do by hand.
If your worry was founded, these apps already wouldn't be on Apple devices because they'd be androind-only
This means the megacorps “have to” play nice on iOS in order to serve up monied audiences to their advertisers.
If exploiting corporations were so all-powerful, why do they have to release on Apple devices at all? Why wouldn't they just exclusively release it on platforms they can exploit? Because consumers demand it. Those same consumers can demand it on the Apple App Store.
The nanosecond bad actors (e.g., mega corps) can have apps exclusively in these alt stores, that’s when those corps will move, reinsert their anti-consumer code that Apple makes them take out, and have that be the only choice. And these mega corps will tell consumers about what’s in there as much as they used to before Apple added the mandatory disclosures which is — not disclose at all.
Also, it’s much easier to make peace with Apple choosing what can be snapped into a modular PDA (personal digital assistant) if you stop distinguishing between hardware and software as if that distinction matters for an appliance, and consider it all firmware and all part of a singular trusted digital experience: “Don’t make me think.”
Today, consumers can choose trusted curation and full integration (iDevices), or non-curated and unbundled (countless brand + Android OS options).
If alt app stores happen, consumers will lose this choice, because nobody will be left counter balancing the exploiting corporations’ power. The race to monetizing exploitation happening before Apple stepped in will continue apace.