Tangentially, I think the tech community needs to be prepared to examine its assumptions about how much control large companies should have over their platforms as they start to resemble utilities. We can’t keep pretending that a duopoly represents real market choice.
Apple has always been just as cutthroat of a business as anyone else, albeit with a different model (hardware) and better branding/PR.
But see how much difference the hardware model makes when the market's down for a bit and Apple needs to juice revenue...
I don't either, but if that's the decision, then where do people come off thinking that they're owed something for participating in a market that they never had a controlling share of in the first place? That's what I don't get. I don't judge people for wanting to put food on the table, but don't act like you're then owed goodwill or whatever for making the rich people richer if that's the way you truly see it. You're supporting capitalism upfront and expecting some sort of vague socialism on the back end. How many times are people gonna get disappointed before they realize that big corporations don't care about them and never have?
It's not like realization is a magic reality bending power however. You can both (a) realize big incumbents are not fair and (b) still have no choice but to go them if you want to make money from your app.
This has been the case with every single instance of software repositories (aka app stores). Remember the whole ffmpeg and libav schism that was fueled in part by repo maintainers imposing their dogmatic will? Or more recently Debian and whether to include non-free code in its installers (aka local repository)? I can't quite grasp why this doesn't appear immediately obvious to anyone.
The only truly free ecosystem is something like Win32, where developers are free to write whatever they want, publishers are free to sell whatever they want where- and however they want, and the operating system is dependent on that free ecosystem for continued relevance.
In fact, you've done a very good job of highlighting the problem with the iPhone. MacOS' software distribution works because it offers a distribution-agnostic API for native apps, same as Windows. iOS/iPadOS don't expose those interfaces to the user, which means the only way to 'install' an app is with Apple's good graces. Compared to Debian, where you can still install non-free packages regardless of how it exists in the repo, Apple's status quo is considerably more restrictive (and abusive).
Apple built this market to control it completely, you could see it coming from miles away. It seems like the big move nowadays is build your market (i.e. "platform") and you get to be judge, jury and executioner. How did you see something like this playing out? I just don't understand how people still aren't cynical enough to see this kind of thing coming.