>Not having choices is a bad situation. I would be surprised if you thought otherwise.

really? I completely disagree, let me illustrate. I don't have much choice of toilet paper when I go to the bathroom, especially in a public restroom. Theres usually only one dispenser, but somehow nobody cares, no one is asking the government to regulate for every Walmart in the country to offer dispensers for every manufacturer, or to regulate residential construction so that every bathroom has one of those industrial size dispensers (or space to install one!) so homeowners can use the jumbo rolls seen in public restrooms. But let's play pretend and imagine if every time you went to use a public restroom there were 8 different toilet papers in the stall. What benefit would that serve, and how would it be a better situation vs the "bad situation" of no choice in toilet paper? Sure, its a bad situation for Charmin as the only toilet paper offered at thousands of Walmarts in the US is probably some cheap Marathon or Georgia-Pacific product, but is it really a social responsibility to make sure that every public restroom has a selection of toilet papers? I would be surprised if you thought that choice would be good here. Given my assumption, why is it not a social responsibility to demand toilet paper choice, and how is toilet paper choice different than app store choice? Serious question, because they seem about equivalent to me.

Moreover, I detest this type of pointless choice in most areas of my life because it is an absolute waste of my time and mental resources. Choice is good for macro economic reasons, not social reasons, and sometimes its not even good for micro economic reasons[1]. It allows for competition in a marketplace, driving down prices as a typical consequence. However competition is also typically a waste of resources, whether it's the consumer's time or engineering costs for duplicate/redundant products/factories/supply chains, and it can certainly lead to lower consumer satisfaction.

Your links are from a developer's point of view, but like it or not developers are businesses, and Apple and the government don't exist to serve them, they exist to serve everyone(or in Apple's case their shareholders and by extension everyone who can afford an iPhone), developers are a small minority of that everyone. It sucks for those developers, sure, but business is rough as a rule, and I find this whole "but the app developers" like a bad joke. I'd be interested in an example of another cottage industry like app development that got some sort of regulation on stores similar to this. Honestly it seems if we look at precedent in the economy, usually this sort of intervention is anti-consumer; the dealership model for car sales drives car prices up 10% [2], for example.

I think small developers should be fearful of this lobby. App development could be a lot more regulated, considering the amount of personal information on a phone and the importance of them in modern life, it seems crazy that the production of eggs is so much more tightly regulated than the production of phone applications. I could probably bounce back from getting salmonella in a month or less, but if all the information on my iphone got stolen and used maliciously it would take me years to recover my identity, if I ever did. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the next type of thing that this lobby went after. Let's create a government body to do randomized security audits on smart phone applications, with arcane and pointless rules. Seriously, check out the laws in the US on the sale and farming of eggs and then tell me you want to let big business get the government involved in regulating apps.

[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jcps.2014....
[2]https://www.mercatus.org/publications/regulation/auto-franch...