How can you claim to adopt a socialist perspective if your attitude basically boils down to allowing the rich (Epic and friends) to "pay no taxes"?
Taxes are paid to governments, not to corporations. What Apple is doing is not akin to taxation, it's gate-keeping a privately owned toll road, and what some people don't seem to understand, is that governments can use their eminent domain authority to regulate ANY aspect of pricing for ANY industry.
Usually, they don't, because it's not worth the effort, but that hands-off nature allows people to develop these weird economic "sovereign citizen" ideas that just because a company develops a market, they are in some way immune from government regulation for how the rules of said market operates.
Ok, I see certain merit in that. Although, I would confer of course that Apple's dictatorial control over the store is ultimately what enables the ecosystem to meet certain levels of quality, security and convenience. Apple has a vision and they have build a system that works according to their vision. You propose to remove them from the arbiter position, basically completely deregulating the app market.
If you follow Kosta Eleftheriou on twitter, you'll see that most of the myths of the appstore - that its apps are secure, that they're safe, that they're tested and regulated are just that, myths. What we have now, is regulation theatre.
I can see how that would make sense but I don't believe that the end result will be a better place. A deregulated model as you propose would give too much leeway to predatory data-harvesting companies (that can offer a compelling free product in exchange for user's privacy), would favor the rich and successful developer while penalizing the small indie dev groups and open-source community (because costs for infrastructure services will inevitably rise) and finally, would be a huge setback for user privacy (as users will be forced to divulge and store personal data with multiple groups instead of one central arbiter). This is not socialism. This is brutal wild capitalism.
None of these things are necessitated by allowing a developer to use Paypal, or Fastspring as the payment processor for an app sold in the app store.
Again, the payment processor, the binary download host, and the app review / hash security generation & notarisation are all completely separate functions. Review and hash notarisation are the only part that have any bearing on security, or privacy, and this is even arguable given the sheer overwhelming scale of scam apps on the appstore - not that it seems to be being reported heavily on MR.
I think you are focusing too much on Apple's dictatorial role and not enough on how all little things fit together. Mind, I totally agree that Apple's control of the iOS market needs to be regulated. The ultimate dictatorial power Apple wields cannot be healthy. But I believe that these issues can be addressed without taking away things that makes iOS great: privacy, security, convenience, software quality and low cost of entry for an underprivileged developer.
Nothing in the proposed regulation to allow developers to use their own choice of payment processor has anything to do with changing any of those things. I would expect if Apple is forced to implement it, they may continue to offer payment through Apple as an intermediary, or indeed use it as a way to push adoption of their own credit card, similar to sign on with Apple.
Again, for a small underprivileged developer, selling software independently is radically cheaper than selling through Apple's stores, and gives them the ability to own their customer, to issue refunds, etc. It's telling that whenever Apple talks about what their stores brought to the table, they always speak as if before THEIR appstore, the only channel for developers was boxed physical media - they never compare themselves against the well established shareware world of downloadable software.
I have no idea what the libertarian capitalist-theology agues (or even what it is). I argue that Apple has created a balanced system where successful players support the weaker ones and your are advocating to tear it down
Weaker players are being routinely stomped by Apple, living in constant fear that Apple will cut off their sole revenue & distribution channel, and shut down their entire business, because some barely-literate app reviewer didn't take the time to actually read what the developer wrote in their update.
I'l give you an example from my own experiences - I had a book update stalled by iBooks reviewers, because they said I was referring to my file an *an* "iBook". The description said nothing of the sort - what it actually said was "An update to correct a behaviour in iBooks". Right now, I have two books on the Apple Books preview site with completely incorrect coverart, because Apple's website and processes messed it up after I uploaded it into their system. I can do nothing about it - it's had a support ticket open for weeks, and the problem can be fixed by disabling a single css variable, but there's nothing I can do about it.
It's only the strong players, like Epic and Basecamp, who are able to speak out about it.
