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Discussion on: Could Apple Be Forced to Reduce App Store Fees?

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Kirill Shestakov • Edited

I think that this issue will run into the same wall all similar developer issues: lack of unity. There's no public authority that can act as a counterweight to the giants like Apple and unite the interests of various developer groups. Apple is a monopoly on their platform and they assert this monopoly in all possible ways, leaving no reasonable option for the developers, but also, hence, slowing down the innovation and progress. It's in this way it's similar to Microsoft's exposed EEE strategy. Microsoft's monopolistic behavior only changed when they lost to WHATWG (funny enough, Apple was a big part of that) and W3C, groups that united much wider developer interests. This took many years, mind you, and it's not perfect, not truly public, and is constantly threatened by other monopolies like Google, which, admittedly, act wiser.

So, with that in mind, how likely is this that anything will be done for this issue? How likely is that an entity big enough will appear to bring balance to the conflict? And now, how likely is it that the issue will simply be forgotten due to our short attention span?

Pessimism aside, there's real big opportunities in this issue. Awareness is brought to Apple as a monopoly. More developers might consider PWAs. In general, since issues like these happen and we learn from them, there's also a certain growing attitude towards monopolies and centralized systems, that has a potential, in time, to create more public and decentralized developer organizations and make the way development happens more fair and ethical.