AOC

This apathy is somewhat absurd considering Lina Khan had been reviving moribund antitrust laws to aggressively push back against Big Tech/monopoly abuses. To the point that she was portrayed as a cartoonish villain by the SV billionaire class who vowed to get rid of her by donating to Trump.

They appreciate this sort of political nihilism where everyone seems to have collective amnesia about the current status quo vs. just a couple years ago and so lament "nothing ever changes, voting is pointless".

Provided the rapture doesn't come, so what? Provided infinite things. It adds or removes nothing.

And yet trivial little alternatives like idk maybe you ever heard of Steam did actually happen, or the entire Android ecosystem itself when there was already an immense Palm app ecosystem that was like desktop apps where you got apps all manner of ways from physical sd cards to web sites to various curated stores. Or idk Epic, over a single app. They are back on the traditional stores now only because they called everyone's bluff and were suceeding, so the old stores caved rather than be seen to lose to someone so much smaller and newer, even in a small way that was more appearance than material.

There is no such thing as unthinkable. It's all not only thinkable, it has all actually already happened before and multiple times.

If something seems unimaginable, that only says something about your imagination not the reality.

I mean sure, but even if people have the ability to select a different app store, why are they going to do this? Even if you MAKE them do it, on device setup as was commented elsewhere, do we mandate Apple put the 3rd party stores above their own? Can Apple indicate which is theirs, or does this bias the answer the user gives?

And more importantly I didn't ask what the user is picking or not picking, I'm asking: why is there an app store out there that's better than the main one? Is a 3rd party app store going to spin up a CDN, a transactions system, handle the customer service involved there, etc. and then just... not do all the evil shit Google and Apple are doing now, which is why their app stores make so much money? You're asking businesses to enter a market with established competitors with solid and wildly profitable business models, and to just have them make less money for the principle of it. Which like, I agree with, but you're gonna have a SHORT list of investors if that's your pitch.

There are very good reasons, starting with the fact that there was no good mobile app experience before Apple created one. And they created one that was half the cost of the terrible stores that existed before.

And they created the hardware and software to make all this possible.