Corruption Is a Cost-of-Living Issue: App Store Edition

The piece argues that Apple and Google’s app-store control is both a democratic threat and a cost-of-living problem. Their stores are presented as essential security safeguards, but the author says app review cannot replace protections built into operating systems and browsers. Instead, the security claim legitimizes distribution monopolies that impose fees, restrict competition, raise switching costs, and pass costs on to consumers and businesses. The author links this concentration of private power to surveillance, gambling, censorship, and cooperation with authoritarian policies, including pressure involving ICE. Investigations prompted by those abuses, the piece argues, should examine the wider system that enabled them.

The proposed alternative is a more capable, open web. On desktop, competing browsers and shared standards expanded web capabilities, pressured operating systems to improve, and reduced their ability to extract rents. On mobile, Apple and Google instead tied important device features to proprietary APIs and app-store distribution, keeping web applications at a disadvantage and deepening user dependence on their platforms. The author describes app stores less as neutral marketplaces than as gatekeepers that tax software and profit from services they claim to police. Because this power was enabled and sustained by government policy, the piece calls for scrutiny that goes beyond individual controversies: restoring meaningful competition and openness is necessary to curb both corruption and the economic burden imposed by the app-store model.