Apple makes legitimately awesome products. That's why this lengthy response.

> Apple's most valuable intangible asset isn't its patents or copyrights – it's an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple's shareholders.

To a large extent, the future of computing hardware and software from Apple in the Mac and in MacOS does coincide with the interests of the shareholders as well. This is not always 1:1, sometimes shareholders want more profit so they can sell some shares, but the company's growth and making the shareholders happy does, at least in Apple's case, translate into better products and services.

> Take the App Store. Apple blocks third parties from offering rival app stores for its iOS platform, which means you can only install apps that have been blessed by Apple. That blessing is contingent on the software authors involved giving $0.30 out of every dollar you spend in their apps to Apple.

You can install any app you want as long as it's installable on the hardware. It's true that the Apple App Store is the only sanctioned curated App Store. I'm not sure who would produce an App Store that they'd like installed on an Apple machine? Are you considering a world where Android apps are installable on Mac and people can install the Android Store on their Mac? Or the Samsung Store? Or etc. I'll be open and say I don't want that. What I want is installers available directly from the company or from an App Store that is really close to the hardware and can curate things. I only need one App Store. If there were more, I'd likely stick with 1 or just get software I want directly from the company or person selling it via their website and installers off the open internet.

> That's why non-Apple audiobook stores like Libro.fm and Downpour require you to buy your books in a browser, which hamstrings them and gives Apple an unbeatable advantage

I don't see selling via a browser as a limitation. Payments in browsers have improved a lot, from the point of view of how seamlessly you can enter payment details to how secure the flow is. If you sell via just a website link, that's less friction than installing an entire app. So unless your app is really heavyweight, the web and links are nice and should not be considered a limitation. If your purchase funnel is for obtaining access rights or licensing rights, the web is more than sufficient.

If Apple's Store in particular results in more sales, that may just be because people prefer Apple's curation over the open web. It's not necessarily going to be true or a given that additional App Stores would have the same commercial success on Apple hardware.

> But that's not the only bad outcome. Some lucky service providers are able to pay the Apple Tax by gouging Apple's customers, raising prices to pay the danegeld. That's the second effect.

They do this already on other platforms, like on Kindle where digital copies are very expensive despite the marginal costs per copy being very low. I think because of LLMs we're going to get to a world where digital books become very cheap by comparison and physical books ship with a key to have a digital copy as well. This is the ideal world for books. But in any case, when it comes to digital copies of books or audiobooks the prices are high everywhere because consumers have not yet realized that marginal costs per digital copy are effectively $0, and that if they're paying full price they should be getting a physical copy with a key to the audio book and the digital book. Consumers will catch on and then this aspect will go away because it's not a factor anymore.

> But Big Tech most assuredly steals from the news: it steals money. The ad-tech duopoly takes 51% out of every ad dollar. Social media holds news subscribers to ransom and requires "boosting" payment to reach the people who've asked to see their articles. And the mobile duopoly takes 30% out of every in-app subscription dollar:

Exactly to my point that other companies charge a lot for digital goods. Granted, they build and maintain the infrastructure and the IP that makes all of these capabilities possible. But more and more free and open capabilities exist for this. Bring back RSS feeds. (Although I think they never really went away...I'm going to set up an RSS feed and reader for the first time in a long time this weekend)

> The real beneficiaries of an open app world is Apple customers. After all, it's Apple customers who bear the 30% app tax when it's priced into the apps they buy and the things they buy in those apps. It's Apple customers who lose access to apps that can't be viably offered because the app tax makes them money-losing propositions. It's Apple customers who lose out on the ability to get apps that Apple decides are unsuitable for inclusion in its App Store.

It is an open app world. I can install any app I want from the open web on my MBP, like I would on a Linux or Windows machine. I don't care if I can't replace the App Store as I only rarely use it, and when I use it it's for the trusted curation by the experts of the hardware and the software or the convenience of its integration into the MBP.

I do think Apple needs to do better for supporting modern web standards for their browser, though, particularly to ensure that browser-based payments and support for payments from the device through other major browsers remains reasonable. And so far it has.

> The minority of Apple customers for whom their brand loyalty is a form of religious devotion insist that "no Apple customer wants these things."

I've been an Apple customer for a few years only. They make really awesome products. I use a Windows machine for Microsoft-stack work as well. There are great Windows machines. I also really enjoyed ElementaryOS and Ubuntu the last time I used them and can see myself using them some more.

I don't actually care if the Apple App Store is the only one present on Apple devices, particularly because of the security benefits if less technically inclined people want to trust the curation there. If the web browsers maintain good modern standards, then it'll be easy and friendly to buy and/or install other software downloaded from the web, and that's what matters. The App Store stuff comes across more like competitors trying to impose a regulatory burden that doesn't actually matter to try to slow down Apple's huge strides in producing the best software and hardware integration that exists on the market.

> If rival app stores – ones that had different editorial standards and different payment policies – existed, the only people who could possibly use them are Apple customers. Android users won't be using an alternative iOS store. Symbian users aren't going to be installing apps from an iOS store offered by someone other than Apple.

Give me a practical example of a different editorial standard or different payment policy that translates into an actual different and desired user flow than what is possible on an Apple device today. Right now it seems like this move is just an unfair attempt by other large corporations to try to crack open Apple's tight integration, which could compromise the quality of the products and services Apple already provides. So what is the fabled additional experience that someone could get if they followed your path?

> If it's true that "Apple customers don't want non-Apple app stores," then Apple wouldn't need to use technological countermeasures and legal threats to prevent them from coming into existence. These non-Apple app stores would fail on their own terms.

This assumes that anyone was polled. It also assumes that there are no technological constraints and deep IP secrets behind the Apple integrations that need protection. It also assumes good intentions on the part of the other companies, and that they actually care about the users rather than just trying to get a look at Apple from much closer up at the hardware/software level.