Apple sells an experience, it's hard to find a common ground to those single store monopoly issues without compromising this experience and tarnishing Apple's precious image.
Suppose Apple standardizes jailbreaking: say they allow you to turn on a switch that creates a sandbox on your device for you to do whatever you want. Your device would then be running freestyle without warranty, fair enough for me as a first mockup. What's going to happen next is a handful of illiterate or unaccountable users will deface Apple's reputation by bombarding news sites with their misfortune. Apple would be cancelled overnight. I'm barely exaggerating.
Now I guess some EU negotiations could help to have some in-app purchases without fees (like buying a book in the Kindle app), avoid getting their app rejected for a shady reason (because rules can be changed whenever Apple sees fit) and, above all, allow me to set my morning alarm to some radio app (this one is ridiculous). The tragedy is that no "developers union" could ever succeed at this.
The last issue, about supporting authoritarian regimes, is probably the most difficult to solve. This is politics, there are no companies or governments that can have it all every time. China is a huge market: you cannot hope staying in business if you try to impose all your rules everywhere. That's the exact same idea behind having the EU make a stand on the single store issues. Also, the most intolerant wins [1].
> What's going to happen next is a handful of illiterate or unaccountable users will deface Apple's reputation by bombarding news sites with their misfortune.
Many Android phones already allow you to gain access to root or to replace the OS that the device ships with (and even more of them allow for indiscriminate sideloading, even without rooting). Has Android's reputation been "defaced" over this opportunity for users to run custom software on their devices?
I was being satirical with my wording but the issue with Apple is different. Android is fragmented by design, there is Google, Samsung, Huawei, etc. companies which sell a lot of other things, so Android image may be less of an issue for them. Apple literally is iDevice, it's more than 2/3 of their revenue.
But indeed "reputation" is more about marketing and at the end of the day the only thing that matters is the margin they can extract from aftermarket sales. As the recent antitrust inquiry shows, we were short of having 40% fee on app store sales.
I think 30% made sense back then when the platform was tiptoeing. Now it may look as an abuse of dominant position, the classical shareholders vs workers game. I wonder how the appstore operating costs and profit have evolved over time.
Macs have had the ability to run unsigned code with no hindrance for ages. There even were numerous software products that modified the system itself. None of this was "tarnishing Apple's precious image". Moreover, back before Apple started notoriously enforcing app signatures requiring a $99 annual fee, people used to love Macs more. They enjoyed the experience of being able to run whatever the hell they wanted on a device they own.
Suppose Apple standardizes jailbreaking: say they allow you to turn on a switch that creates a sandbox on your device for you to do whatever you want. Your device would then be running freestyle without warranty, fair enough for me as a first mockup. What's going to happen next is a handful of illiterate or unaccountable users will deface Apple's reputation by bombarding news sites with their misfortune. Apple would be cancelled overnight. I'm barely exaggerating.
Now I guess some EU negotiations could help to have some in-app purchases without fees (like buying a book in the Kindle app), avoid getting their app rejected for a shady reason (because rules can be changed whenever Apple sees fit) and, above all, allow me to set my morning alarm to some radio app (this one is ridiculous). The tragedy is that no "developers union" could ever succeed at this.
The last issue, about supporting authoritarian regimes, is probably the most difficult to solve. This is politics, there are no companies or governments that can have it all every time. China is a huge market: you cannot hope staying in business if you try to impose all your rules everywhere. That's the exact same idea behind having the EU make a stand on the single store issues. Also, the most intolerant wins [1].
[1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...