The App Store Was Always Authoritarian
High-modernism as handmaiden to autocracy is depressingly predictable.
And now we see it clear, like a Cupertino sunrise bathing Mt. Bielawski in amber: Apple will censor its App Store at the behest of the Trump administration without putting up a fight.
It will twist words into their antipodes to serve the powerful at the expense of the weak.
To better serve autocrats, it will talk out both sides of its mouth in ways it had previously reserved for dissembling arguments against threats to profits, like right-to-repair and browser choice.
They are, of course, linked.
Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate. Namely, selective exemption from tariffs and an end to the spectre of pro-competition regulation that might bring real browser choice in the US, the EU, and around the world.
Over the past few weeks, Tim Apple got a lot what he paid for, with the full weight of the US foreign and industrial policy apparatus threatening the EU over DMA enforcement. This has been part of a full-court press from Cupertino. Apple simultaneously threatened the EU while rolling out fresh astroturf for pliant regulators to recline on. This is loud, coordinated, and calculated. But calculated to achieve what? Why is the DMA such a threat to Apple?
Interoperability.
The DMA holds the power to unlock true, safe, interoperability via the web. It’s core terms require that Apple facilitate real browser engine choice, and Apple is all but refusing, playing games to prevent powerful and safe iOS browsers and the powerful web applications they facilitate. Web applications that can challenge the App Store.
Unlike tariffs, which present a threat to short-term profits through higher costs and suppression of upgrades in the near term, interoperability is a larger and more insidious boogeyman for Apple. It could change everything.
Apple’s profits are less and less attributable to innovation as “services” revenue swells Cupertino’s coffers out of all proportion to iPhone sales volume. “Services” is code for rent extraction from captive users and developers. If they could acquire and make safe apps outside the App Store, Apple wouldn’t be able to take 30% from an outlandishly large fraction of the digital ecosystem’s wealthiest players.
Apple understands browser choice is a threat to its rentier model. The DMA holds the potential for developers to finally access the safe, open, and interoperable web technologies that power most desktop computing today. This is a particular threat to Apple, because its class-leading hardware is perfectly suited to running web applications. This helps to explain why Apple simultaneously demands control over all browser technology on iOS while delaying, constantly breaking foundational web APIs, and gaslighting developers about Apple’s unwillingness to solve pressing problems.
Keeping capable, stable, high-quality browsers away from iOS is necessary to maintain the App Store’s monopoly on the features every app needs. Keeping other software distribution mechanisms from offering those features at a lower price is a hard requirement for Cupertino’s extractive business model. The web (in particular, PWAs) present a worst-case scenario.
Unlike alternative app stores that let developers decouple distributing proprietary apps from Apple’s App Store, PWAs free developers from building for each OS at all, allowing them to deliver apps though a zero-cost cost platform that builds on standardised APIs. For small developers, this is transformative, and it’s why late-stage Apple cannot abide laws that create commercial fairness and enable safe, secure, pro-user alternatives.
This is what Apple is mortgaging its brand (or, if you prefer, soul) to prevent: a world where users have a real choice in browsers.
Horrors.
Apple is loaning its monopoly on iOS software to yet another authoritarian regime without a fight, painting a stark contrast: when profits are on the line, Cupertino will gaslight democratic regulators and defy pro-user laws with all the $1600/hr lawyers Harvard can graduate. And when it needs a transactional authoritarian’s help to make that happen, temporarily loaning out Apple’s godlike power over iOS devices to censor clearly protected speech isn’t too much to ask. Struggle for thee, but not for me.
The kicker is that the only alternative for affected users and developers is Apple’s web apps implementation; the same platform Cupertino serially knee-caps to deflect competition with its high-tax offerings.
It is no exaggeration to say the tech press is letting democracy down by failing to connect the dots. Why is Apple capitulating? Because Apple wants things from the government. What are those things? We should be deep into that debate, but our reportage and editorial classes cannot seem to grasp that A precedes B. The obvious answers are also the right ones: selective protection from tariffs, defanged prosecution by the DOJ, and an umbrella from the EU’s democratic, pro-competition regulation.
The Verge tiptoed ever so close to getting it, quoting letters that former Apple executives sent the company:
I used to believe that Apple were unequivocally ‘the good guys,’” Hodges writes. “I passionately advocated for people to understand Apple as being on the side of its users above all else. I now feel like I must question that.”
This is a clue; a lead that a more thoughtful press and tech commentariat could use to evaluate the frames the parties deploy to their own benefit.
The tech press is failing to grasp the moral stakes of API access. Again and again they flunk at connecting boring questions of who can write and distribute programs that use particular capabilities of phones to urgent issues of power over publication and control of devices. By declining to join these threads, they allow the unearned and increasingly indefensible power of mobile OS vendors to proliferate. The urgent question is how that power can be attenuated, or as Poppper put it:
We must ask whether…we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: “Who should rule?” by the new question: “How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?”
But the tech press does not ask these questions.
Instead of questioning why Apple’s OS is so fundamentally insecure that an App Store is necessary, they accept the ever-false idea that iOS has been relatively secure because of the App Store.
Instead of confronting Apple with the reality that it used the App Store to hand out privacy-invading APIs in undisciplined ways to unscrupulous actors, it congratulates Cupertino on the next episode of our nightly kayfabe. The links between Apple’s monopoly on sensitive APIs and the growth of monopolies in adjacent sectors are rarely, if ever, questioned. Far too often, the tech press accepts the narrative structure of Apple’s marketing, satisfying pangs of journalistic conscience with largely ineffectual discussions about specific features that will not upset the power balance.
Nowhere, e.g., in The Verge’s coverage of these letters is there a discussion about alternatives to the App Store. Only a few outlets ever press Apple on its suppression of web apps, including failure to add PWA install banners and essential capabilities. It’s not an Apple vs. Google horse-race story, and so discussion of power distribution doesn’t get coverage.
Settling for occasionally embarrassing Apple into partially reversing its most visibly egregious actions is ethically and morally stunted. Accepting the frame of “who should rule?” that Cupertino reflexively deploys is toxic to any hope of worthwhile technology because it creates and celebrates the idea of kings, leaving us supine relative to the mega-corps in our phones.
This is, in a word, childish.
Adults understand that things are complicated, that even the best intentioned folks get things wrong, or can go astray in larger ways. We build institutions and technologies to protect ourselves and those we love from the worst impacts of those events, and those institutions always model struggles over power and authority. And if we are lucky enough to build well, we build balanced systems that attenuate any attempts at over authoritarianism.
In other words, the exact opposite of Apple’s infantilising and authoritarian world view.
Instead of debating which wealthy vassals might be more virtuous than the current rulers, we should instead focus on attenuating the power of these monarchical, centralising actors. The DMA is doing this, creating the conditions for interoperability, and through interoperability, competition. Apple know it, and that’s why they’re willing to pawn their own dignity, along with the rights of fellow Americans, to snuff out the threat.
These are not minor points. Apple has power, and that power comes from its effective monopoly on the APIs that make applications possible on the most important computing platform of our adult lives.
Protecting this power has become an end unto itself, curdling the pro-social narratives Apple takes pains to identify itself with. Any reporter that bothers to do what a scrappy band of web developers have done — to actually read the self-contradictory tosh Apple flings at regulators and legislators around the world — would have been better prepared for this moment. They would be able to pattern match; to see that twisting words to defend the indefensible isn’t somehow alien to Apple. It’s not even unusual.
But The Verge, 404, and even Wired are declining to connect the dots. If our luminaries can’t or won’t dig in, what hope do less thoughtful publications with wider audiences have?
Apple’s power and profits have made it an enemy of democracy and civic rights at home and abroad. A mealy-mouthed tech press that cannot see or say the obvious is worse than useless; it is an ally in Apple’s attempts to obfuscate.
The most important story about smartphones for at least the past decade has been Cupertino’s suppression of the web, because that is a true threat to the App Store, and Apple’s power flows from the monopolies it braids together. As Cory Doctorow observed:
Apple’s story – the story of all centralized, authoritarian technology – is that you have to trade freedom for security. If you want technology that Just Works(TM), you need to give up on the idea of being able to override the manufacturer’s decisions. It’s always prix-fixe, never a la carte.
This is a kind of vulgar Thatcherism, a high-tech version of her maxim that “there is no alternative.” Decomposing the iPhone into its constituent parts – thoughtful, well-tested technology; total control by a single vendor – is posed as a logical impossibility, like a demand for water that’s not wet
— Cory Doctorow,
“Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack)”
Doctorow’s piece on these outrages is a must-read, as it does what so many in the tech press fail to attempt: connecting patterns of behaviour over time and geography to make sense of Apple’s capitulation. It also burrows into the rot at the heart of the App Store: the claim that anybody should have as much power as Apple has arrogated to itself.
We can see clearly now that this micro-authoritarian structure is easily swayed by macro-authoritarians, and bends easily to those demands. As James C. Scott discusses:
I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, an aspiration that we have already seen at work in scientific forestry, but one raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious level. “High modernism” seems an appropriate term for this aspiration. As a faith, it was shared by many across a wide spectrum of political ideologies. Its main carriers and exponents were the avant-garde among engineers, planners, technocrats, high-level administrators, architects, scientists, and visionaries.
If one were to imagine a pantheon or Hall of Fame of high-modernist figures, it would almost certainly include such names as Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius Nyerere. They envisioned a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.
— James C. Scott,
“Seeing Like A State”
This is also Apple’s vision for the iPhone; an unshakeable belief in its own rightness and transformative power for good. Never mind all the folks that get hurt along the way, it is good because Apple does it. There is no claim more central to the mythos of Apple’s marketing wing, and no deception more empowering to abusers of power.
Apple claims to stand for open societies, but POSIWID shows that to be a lie. It is not just corrupted, but itself has become corrupting; a corrosive influence on the day-to-day activities and right necessary to engage in democracy and the rule-of-law.
Apple’s Le Corbusierian addiction to control has not pushed it into an alliance with those resisting oppression, but into open revolt against efforts that would make the iPhone an asset for citizens exercising their legitimate rights to aid the powerless. It scuttles and undermines open technologies that would aid dissidents. It bends the knee to tyranny because unchecked power helps Cupertino stave off competition, preserving (it thinks) a space for its own messianic vision of technology to lift others out of perdition.
If the consequences were not so dire, it would be tragically funny.
Let’s hope our tech press find their nerve, and a copy of “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” before we lose the ability to laugh.
I spent a dozen and change years at Google, and my greatest disappointment in leadership over those years was the way the founders coddled the Android team’s similarly authoritarian vision.
For the price of a prominent search box on every phone, the senior leadership (including Sundar) were willing to sow the seeds of the web’s obsolescence, handing untold power to Andy Rubin’s team of Java zealots. It was no secret that they sought to displace the web as the primary way for users to experience computing, substituting proprietary APIs for open platforms along the way.
With the growth of Android, Play grew in influence, thanks growing revenue and a need to cover for Android’s original sins, leading to a series of subtler, but no less effective, tactics that dovetailed with Apple’s suppression of the web on iOS. The back doors and exotic hoops developers must jump through to gain distribution for interoperable apps remains a scandal.
But more than talking about Google and what it has done, we should talk about how we talk about Google. In specific, how the lofty goals of its Search origins were undercut by those anti-social, anti-user failures in Android and Play.
It’s no surprise that Google is playing disingenuous games around providing access to competitors regarding web apps on Android, while simultaneously pushing to expand its control over app distribution. The Play team covet what Apple have, and far from exhibiting any self-awareness of their own culpability, are content to discredit whatever brand reputation Google may have left so long as it can expand its ability to tax software.
And nobody can claim that power is being used for good.
Google is not creating moral distance between itself and Apple, or seeking to help developers build PWAs to steer around the easily-censored channels it markets, and totally coincidentally, taxes. Google is Apple’s collaborator in capitulation. A dark moral void, trotting out the same, tired tactic of hiding behind Apple’s skirt whenever questions about the centralising and authoritarian tendencies of App Store monopolies crop up. For 15 years, Android has been content to pen 1-pagers for knock-off versions of whatever Apple shipped last year, including authoritarian-friendly acquiescence.
Play is now the primary software acquisition channel for most users around the world, and that should cause our tech press to intensify scrutiny of these actions, but that’s not how Silicon Valley’s wealth-pilled technorati think, talk, or write. The Bay Area’s moral universe extends the wall of the privilege bubble, and we don’t talk about the consequences of enshittified, trickle-down tech, or even bother to look hard at it. That would require using Android and…like…ew.
Far from brave truth-telling, the tech press we have today treats the tech the other half (ok, 80%) use as a curio; a destination to gawp at on safari, rather than a geography whose residents are just as worthy of dignity and respect as any other. And that’s how Google is getting away with shocking acts of despicable cowardice, but with a fraction of the negative coverage.
And that’s a scandal, too.