> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?

At best a walled garden is collective bargaining -- a group of users (buyers) lock into requiring vendors to negotiate with their representative, and because their business is collectively valuable vendors have to meet higher privacy standards or whatever the users care about, which they couldn't extract if negotiating individually with huge companies like Facebook.

So, Apple will get yelled at whenever it fails to be a good agent in collective bargaining -- either by excluding quality vendors and driving up their costs, or by including low-quality vendors. Either one gives up the benefits to users of the walled garden.

An index of reliable apps is, you know, fine. An index with a business structure that ensures better collective bargaining gets interesting.

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Barbing a day ago | parent [-]

Sounds obvious now that you said it.

Anyone dispute the agent/collective bargaining framing before I internalize it forever? :)

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burnerthrow008 a day ago | parent [-]

I think the principal-agent / collective bargaining framework is correct, but I would dispute that the principals (the users, not app developers) are upset by how it works.

Most of the noise seems to be coming from developers, so, to me, it looks like Apple is doing a good job as my agent.

	▲	ryandrake a day ago \| parent [-]
		> Most of the noise seems to be coming from developers, so, to me, it looks like Apple is doing a good job as my agent. Yea, whether we like it or not, app developers (as a general group, not you, the individual good guy) have proven themselves to be generally bad actors and unfortunately need to be treated as attackers. The more I hear developers complain about a platform not letting them do this or that, the more at ease I am about running software on that platform.