[johnny35]

This seems like a significant milestone in what I really hope is the path toward the app ecosystem opening up to the level of freedom we’ve enjoyed in the web and desktop software space for decades now. Needing the recurring approval from two mega-corps scrutinizing whatever details of your business and customer relationships they wish, forcing their way in between… feels terrible compared to hooking up to a standard payment processor and doing your thing on the open web. I don’t want your help marketing and distributing my app, I just want to be able to serve my customers and I’d prefer if you mostly ignored us. The phone calls with Apple begging for them to see our point of view and interpretation of their deliberately vague requirements, the stories about companies hiring someone whose personal Google account activities become toxic for the company’s Play Store account, it all just sucks. I didn’t dedicate my life to doing business in software and the internet to be this directly under any one thumb. Crossing my fingers for more moves in the right direction.

[judge2020]

Even if this came to fruition, someone is still the gatekeeper. Many often forget that safe browsing gates access to every domain you type in and will throw up an error page if it's been flagged as malware. The same already happens for side-loading apps via Play Protect[0], iOS would surely have a similar system with Apple collecting samples of side-loaded apps and continuously scanning & expanding their blocklist of malicious apps.

0: https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/2812853?hl=en

[f1refly]

Even this system would be a huge leap forward, because we'd go from a whitelist model controlled by a monopoly to a blacklist model controlled by a monopoly. The sheer effort of keeping up to maintain the absolute user abuse by apple and google is infintitely higher than what we have now.

[johnny35]

I get that - it’s not like traditional payment processors never shut anyone off. Reality is all in the squishy gray area, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a meaningful difference between what it’s like selling a service on a website vs. with an app.