Sarah Perez: Apple Has Lost Its Confidence

What’s worse is that Apple doesn’t seem to think that IAP can stand up to the competition: app developers’ websites.

I don’t agree with everything in this piece but it does make me think about the objectively funny way that some people will say:

1. I believe in free market competition delivering the best results to consumers
2. I believe that the App Store’s in-app purchases (IAP) is the best way to take payments in iOS apps
3. If there was even a hint of competition, no one would use IAP anymore, therefore we can not have competition to that consumer are protected

Either you don’t actually think IAP is as good as you say it is, or you believe in regulating markets to protect consumers a tad more than you’d like to admit.

This makes me think of this this Platformer where Zoë Schiffer interviewed Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko. She asked him about Mastodon’s added complexity compared to centralized social networks, and this is how he started his answer:

What we’re doing is not new in the sense that it's returning to the roots of the internet — to decentralization. It's how the internet started, and then it eventually became monopolized through these large tech companies.

I’m pretty sure if we invented websites and the web browser in 2024 there would be a large group of people loudly arguing that no normal person could ever figure it out. “An app that loads more than one thing? And those things can link to each other? Some sort of interconnected network???? That’s just for nerds.” I feel like we’ve overcorrected as a community: focusing on making computer interfaces more intuitive was of course a great thing, but I get the feeling a non-insignificant contingent of commentators have taken this to the point where they think people who aren’t them are just dumb idiots who can barely figure out how a fork works, let alone how to use a piece of software that does more than one simple thing.

It just feels a bit like we’ve overcorrected and that our fellow human beings are more capable than we give them credit for.