And the purpose of a market is to force for profit corporations to compete with other actors. Sometimes this requires regulation when a one or a few get too large.
And no, competition doesn’t mean participants are forced to deliver better value for money.
And no, industry won’t regulate itself.
We need regulation to force market participants to participate in a way that even remotely resembles “fair”. The default mode of operation for suppliers in a market is “extract maximum value.”
That's maybe fine, but right now there are only two options, Apple with iOS or Google with Android. They can control pricing, the can control what is there and not, they get all the user stats, they decide what the apps can do and not do etc.
Is this it? We are stuck with these two forever?
Many have tried and huge firms at that, to create an operating system and app store for phones, like Microsoft with Windows and Samsung with Bada (and I think they had another OS too). And you can't say they have no resources, money, marketing channels etc.
Who will manage to break this duopoly and when?
I think the only real chance is that web apps/PWAs get up to par with native apps. It's getting there, but Apple is also blocking this with limitations in their Safari browser (and the iOS version of Chrome (which apparently on iOS is just a wrapper around Safari) so also there they are hindering development).
Should have clarified that it's not an issue that they're profiting. It is sometimes implied that they _have_ to charge 30% to run the app store. My point is that the app store could exist without the 30% charge.