What is the Problem with the Single App Store Approach

Hey.com, Spotify, ProtonMail are just few of the companies that started raising their voices regarding the abusive practices of Apple and the App Store. (See protonmail takes a stance against apple practices ).

Apple charges 30% as transaction fees for any purchase done within the apps. So many developers opted to charge outside of their apps. For example, you can get a subscription to Netflix on their website and then use the app. The main problem is that Apple has different stances regarding different companies, as proven by the fight between Hey and Apple. There was also the fight between Fortnite and Apple.

The outcome of having a single app store, is, therefore, that

• Apps developed by Apple itself will be a +30% more competitive.
• There's an incentive to develop free apps that use ad services.

The first point goes directly in detriment of fair competition, not dissimilar to how Amazon crushes small entrepreneurs on its platform .

The second point has several privacy concerns, since selling ads means profiling users online . There is a revenue threshold that an app needs to surpass to be self-sustainable. With a 30% markup, there's a bias hard to overcome in detriment of user privacy online .