> Google is acting here as the owner and maintainer of a services ecosystem... > they increasingly experience difficulty to contain issues within that ecosystem and prevent them from spreading (piracy, malware, hacking,...)

I wonder if the smartphone app industry is big enough now that allowing just two corporates to govern them is no longer fair or democratic.

It has outgrown the "ecosystem" word a long time ago. It's a genuine industry now.

Apps are such a fundamental part of most people's lives now (whether they like it or not), and these two companies have a disproportionate amount of power over an entire industry.

This is more or less the journey the EU has started with the Digital Markets Act, but in a very agnostic way.

They identified that, among others, Apple and Google are operating a "Digital Market" of significant size within their ecosystem, where they invite others to participate and compete, and it's the role of a government to ensure fair conditions in the markets of its economy so forces can flow freely.

The way they defined that is very smart. They don't define what an "app" is or an ecosystem, they identify in a objective way that their operations constitute a market, and that they have to comply to certain rules in order to ensure fair competition.

I just hope that they can see this through and have those Digital Markets established as proper "markets" in the same sense as physical markets are, before some political "wind of change" is dissolving everything again.

Apple is very much counting on such a wind of change, by actively rallying its users against the EU...