> “Y Combinator — and the larger venture capital community — have long been hesitant to back app-based businesses that were poor investments due to the Apple Tax,”

This could be good, if it encourages people to re-learn the value of open standards, like Web is supposed to be, rather than helping to perpetuate the proprietary app stores.

Also, I think it's noteworthy that, once a company gets customers locked into a proprietary app store, they show their true extremely greedy, abusive, and indifferent side to third-party developers. No matter how warm and fuzzy a brand they craft for consumers.

Are Bay Area libertarian techbros ironically going to try to rely on government regulation to keep the awful proprietary app stores tolerable, or will they rediscover what industry has known for decades about the value of open standards, and direct their efforts consistent with that?

Seriously. If Apple put even half of the effort into open web standards that they've put into building their mobile SDKs and the App Store ecosystem, we'd have webapps that would be just as capable, performant, and secure as native apps can be.

Though I'm sure then Apple would lock a lot of device access by websites behind a domain allowlist that you have to pay a bunch of money to get on.