Can't help but notice the definitions in this law are the most revealing part. When cowsay is legally an "application" and your friend's personal website with a download link is a "covered application store," that's not sloppy drafting. That's the deeper mechanism working exactly as designed.

This is the same pattern we keep seeing everywhere in society (and it links together with the pattern of enshittification): set the compliance floor at exactly the level that Apple, Google, and Microsoft already meet, make the definitions broad enough that everyone else technically falls under them, and let the liability created by that do the rest. You don't need to ban hobby distros. You just need to make maintaining one a legal risk egregious enough that no volunteer is willing to or even can afford to take it on.

76-0 in the Assembly. Ask yourself when the last time was that 76 California legislators unanimously agreed on anything that didn't have a well-funded lobby behind it.