[concinds]

This misses the problem.

Countless, countless, countless iOS devs, even extremely high-profile ones like Marco Arment, can talk all day long about problems they've had with App Review and the capriciousness of the App Store. Tons of high-profile, reputable devs can talk about specific apps they were making or wanted to make, never saw the light of day, not because the apps violate App Store policy, but because App Review is such a minefield that they didn't want to bother.

Apple literally publicly said that devs criticising the App Store, or App Review practices, could expect retaliation.

It's insane that devs are expected to only provide apps through a single storefront, that operates at such a huge scale that moderation is necessarily arbitrary, mostly algorithmic, and inconsistent. The App Store monopoly is indefensible.

[ericmay]

You're just shifting the target from one monopoly app store that's high profile to a dozen or so (maybe fewer) app stores who will also have their own arbitrary rules and moderation.

You might say, well at least they have alternatives from Apple. Sure, but then if those alternatives are sufficiently good competitors we likely lost all of the privacy benefits and so forth from the Apple App Store and they'll have their own arbitrary review practices and retaliatory nature. And if they as good of alternatives then most likely the majority of these apps with "problems" are just scam artists and should be rejected anyway except now they can thrive on people who are susceptible to being scammed.

To me this is a little bit like having a debate over the First Amendment where I'm kind of sitting here and saying yea you shouldn't be allowed to yell fire! in a crowd as part of the amendment from the start and others are just asking for maximum freedom of speech, only to have this legislated later anyway.