People have been voting with their wallets since forever, and look where it got us.

The reality is that asking people to vote with their wallets does not work. But this specific case is even worse, because it's not possible to "vote with your wallet" to begin with.

The specific things the blog post notes are "how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store and in-app purchases, how awful Xcode is as a development environment"

So let's say you want to build a mobile app that actually reaches people. There's a duopoly, so you have to support Android and iOS. What are your options for "voting with your wallet" then? There's nothing you can buy that lets you reach iOS with your app without using Apple's ecosystem.

"Voting with your wallet" is what people tell you to do if they don't want you to do the things that actually work, which, in this case, is regulation. We have two companies controlling both viable mobile platforms. There is nowhere else to go for 99.9% of people. You can have a billion dollars, and you still can't "vote with your wallet." You're still going to own either an iPhone or an Android phone, and support both if you want to publish an app.

The obvious answer is that the two companies that control these platforms need to be regulated. Apple can play dumb if it's only Europe, but even so, the cracks are starting to show (e.g. Apple's recent copy/paste interoperability announcement). If the US joined in, the dam would break.

> You're still going to own either an iPhone or an Android phone

Don’t forget that option C) “none of the above”, is no longer viable since we’ve reorganized the world around the smartphone. The analog alternatives for basic, vital life transactions are dwindling or eliminated in many circumstances.

You're right that to deploy an app to Apple's app store you have to pay them. The $100/yr access ransom is unavoidable if you want to have the option of making money there. But I've gone to great lengths to avoid the rest of the stuff that genuinely sucks about building for Apple: I use Flutter to avoid most of the iOS nonsense. I use Android Studio on Linux for the vast majority of my development. I target Android/web/iOS and test mainly on the first two. I use codemagic.io to avoid having to have a mac to run ios builds.

I did have to borrow a mac and use xcode to set up my project, I wish that weren't the case.

I'd love to tell iOS users to just use the web version, but in-app purchases on web are a real headache compared to mobile and I haven't set up Stripe or equivalent. And Apple has crippled the web experience on iOS anyway with Safari.

Does any of my approach "vote with my wallet"? No. It's just for me, to avoid the horrible experience of Apple to the extent possible while also reaching users that choose to use iOS.

“Regulating” in the current environment just means mandated coziness with intelligence and law enforcement: scanning your files (Chat Control 1.0), backdoors (Chat Control 2.0), suppression of ideas through mandatory moderation, age verification.

What we need is antitrust enforcement, breaking of digital locks, and adversarial interoperability. This can be accomplished through certain forms of regulation, but you need to be specific or you’re going to get the bad kind of regulation.

Hiring someone to make an alternative. If your country makes labor difficult to buy then that's on your country, not Apple.

Regulation is a part of it.

But most of tehse companies make money off of the services. So if you want tos end Apple a message, cancel all your services...Music, iCloud, etc.

Android phones are easy to use without a google account.

You forgot Harmony OS from Huawei used by 50 million people, oh wait, no you can't vote on anything