[thephyber]

> A solution here is to introduce a standard mobile app format, with standard APIs to interact with the OS.

I would argue that's exactly what Android is. It's a mobile OS with a mobile app ecosystem of APIs.

But the fact that no government forced all smartphones to use it means it didn't and likely won't happen. Also, governments don't seem to move at the speed of iOS/Android features, so taking that hypothetical path would have likely meant all mobile phone features slowed a lot.

> The issue is app stores.

Another solution is for governments to enforce reasonable access to all mobile app companies and to make sure the purchases and data are portable to all similar devices (say all smartphones or all game consoles). It's not that hard to make the coupling of the app binary to the device tight but the license to use the software portable.