“It’s time to rethink the App Store”

@baldur Oh boy, so many problems with that post. And that's aside from getting basic facts wrong (like the amount Apple made from the App Store, which is accurate in the CNBC story linked). His point about “anything else is heavily disempowering at best, and a barrier to trade and innovation at worst”… well, it's disempowering to developers who want to write privacy-abusing software which copies clipboard data and tracks cross-app usage without user consent, sure. Not so much to end users who get more secure apps.

And as for trade and innovation? Not sure if he's old enough to remember the "innovative" software on mobile prior to the existence of monolithic app stores, but I am. Or the fact there was no mobile software industry to speak of.

@ianbetteridge I agree.

I primarily use micro.blog as a public bookmarking tool so the benchmark for posting isn't "do I agree with this?" but "might I want to look at this again at some point in the future?". In this case I agree with you that he's biased against the very app store concept.

(I don't think it would be a bad idea per se to add some form of Gatekeeper-like functionality to iOS/iPadOS as long as it's in addition to the app store, though.)

I do disagree with you on one point (might not even be a disagreement) which is that I do think that the app store stifles innovation on the iPad (iPhone apps are plenty innovative tbh and mac apps can bypass the app store). I don't think the available apps come even close to realising the iPad's potential and I think the app store is a big reason why that's the case.

I also do think that the app store is largely mismanaged as well: the capricious denials, statements that directly contradict their actions, no trials and an in-app payment system that seems tailoured for abusive games design, the very dubious and inconsistent 'reader app' policy. But I still think there's value in the app store provided they figure out how to manage it properly at some point.

(Sorry about the late reply. I really should check micro.blog replies more often.)

@baldur Hmmm not sure about that point about it stifling innovation on the iPad – I think if you compared where iPadOS is for proper apps to where Android is for tablets, you can see a big difference. But that of course is for an operating system with tiny market share and very little interest. I suspect interest and innovation will grow as iPadOS and iOS get further apart in APIs and capability.

@ianbetteridge I mean, the app store is absolutely the reason why the iPad has a fraction of the web developer tools that it should have, considering the power of the hardware and the age of the platform.

Of course, I’m still holding out hope that if Apple adds virtualisation to the processor for the mac, that’ll let them roll out something like WSL but for iPad as an official app. But I don’t know whether they’ll want to given their seeming disinterest in developers as customers.

That said, I’m a huge fan of the iPad Pro and it has many of my favourite apps and I use it for hours every day, so I’m mostly arguing that things could be better, not that they are bad in the first place 🙂

@baldur @ianbetteridge

I primarily use micro.blog as a public bookmarking tool …

Interesting. I tend to use your micro.blog posts as a list of recommended reading. For which I'm very grateful.

@baldur Yeah, I get that. I wouldn’t expect anyone to agree with everything they think is worth reading, or that they recommend to others.