[ryao]

The average person needs safeguards to prevent them from being tricked into installing malware by seemingly trustworthy black hats. They should not be given devices that lack safeguards. That means having a gatekeeper that curates things. Be it Apple or Google, a gate keeper is a necessity for security.

Even for non-average people, gatekeepers like Gentoo's or Debian's package maintainer(s) do a great deal of good.

[scrozart]

The idea that only these 2 companies can provide a platform for secure apps is patently absurd. What's stopping another company other than these companies' stranglehold? If you want to say resources, I guarantee I'm not alone in a desire to use smaller vendors if they had a good track record of hosting secure apps.

I lean WAY left and still agree the free market would have solved this ages ago.

[kdfjgbdfkjgb]

These 2 companies having a stranglehold is the free market. Antitrust legislation is what would allow other companies to compete with these 2, and antitrust legislation doesn't exist in a free market.

[Kinrany]

Free markets only ever exist because of regulation.

[andrei_says_]

My friend’s 11 year old plays games on his iPhone, downloaded from the Apple App Store.

I spent a few minutes looking over his shoulder.

A bit of gameplay followed by increasing amounts of gambling for power ups and constant reminders to buy power ups. This should be absolutely illegal.

Dark patterns upon dark patterns manipulating the kid to squeeze his parents for real money, by habituating gambling habits and normalizing a horrible experience.

Apple will never address these issues because these games make them truckloads of money.

[Gorbzel]

Shouldn’t your friend be monitoring his kid’s usage? Why is everything always some government/capitalist entity’s responsibility?

[andrei_says_]

Gambling is closer to smoking than regular gaming.

All the boy’s friends play the game and similar games. It’s an uphill battle and an extraordinary pressure on the parents to control each game that gets played and micromanage to that extend - to the detriment of their relationship with the child, because fighting these intentionally instilled addictive patterns will create upset in the child and tension in the relationship. The game devs pay psychologists to create the addiction at scale which the parents just cannot compete with.

In reality parents have finite amounts of energy and a finite numbers of battles to fight. Eat your food, go to school, do your homework, keep your phone charged and call me when you need me to pick you up. That kind of thing.

Having week longs drama forbidding a game that everyone else plays is just not on the map.

[johnnyanmac]

I agree with you in spirit, but I also can't help but think that most other internet denizens won't be satisfied with just banning the loobox aspects. most of the AAA games industry already moved past that and into battlepasses or flooding a store with direct purchase cosmetics.

It's more the nickle and diming people hate, not the actual gambling. And I don't know if we can or should regulate that.

[andrei_says_]

The gambling patterns are related to taking additional action to getting the rewards - like spinning a wheel, choosing to take an additional step risking the current reward for the chance to win another one. That’s gambling, intentionally constructed to be addictive. It changes habits, normalizes addiction and is harmful.

[johnnyanmac]

Sure, and the console industry is already moving past it. It's now just asking you to lay $10-20 for a "season" of a battle pass, where you grind and get more rewards for your grinding. No RNG at all, just one input, and X actions to guarantee Y rewards. No more, no less.

But the games discourse online isn't exactly giving games like Fortnite any slack despite no longer using lootboxes for its monetization. Or on a fighter game (of which few ever used lootboxes) for offering dozens of skins.

That's the dangerous part on what to or not regulate. Do we want thr government regulating how many add-ons or cosmetics a game can sell?

[Guvante]

You could say the same about the post above it.

Why is it different?

Having safer defaults is fine, but why is there no way for alternatives to exist? (30% of all revenue is why BTW)

[nitwit005]

The monopoly isn't necessary for that though. It can just present you with choices of app store during phone setup. It's not like some Amazon app store is going to be automatically less secure.

[Nathanba]

Those safeguards should be on a technical level and with the human gatekeepers being swappable for whoever you trust most. Which is what different app stores effectively do: different human rating, moderation and trust descriptions.

[gitaarik]

Yes, that is why the government needs to make better regulations so people are safeguarded against Google / Apple malware.

[guru4consulting]

yeah, agree that gatekeepers are needed. But why only Apple and Google should be the gatekeepers? why not others? why not crowd curated, open sourced gatekeeping for at least the nerdy folks? And we all know that the current gatekeeping is subpar quality.

[martin82]

The free market would have created many trustworthy gatekeepers itself.

And given how much scammy shit there is on the two major AppStores, I would say that it is clear as day and night that Apple and Google utterly suck as "gatekeepers".

[beenBoutIT]

Exactly - the fundamental problem is that it takes an above average person to understand this. Tech is something that most lawmakers, judges, attorneys and jurors don't get and asking them to regulate it is a mistake.

They'll open up the floodgates and average people will end up dealing with fake Epic apps. A decade from now maybe that same courtroom would better appreciate the value of a trusted gatekeeper.

[InsomniacL]

Apple/Google can be the GateKeepers of App Stores.

Look at the PKI industry, they have a greater need for integrity but there's still a healthy market of certificate suppliers.