It makes no sense for two large and powerful companies like Apple and Google to completely control software distribution on mobile phones and it must stop
I have written extensively on this blog over the last decade and a half about the significant negative consequences …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2020 AVC argument lands mid-arc in a fight that had already been running for years: a 2018 Bloomberg report quantified what falling app store commissions would cost Apple and Google amid pushback from developers like Valve and Netflix, and an early-2020 OneZero investigation catalogued the potentially anti-competitive ways the iOS App Store restricts consumers and third parties. The post is a plain-language distillation of the developer-side case at exactly the moment regulators began picking it up.
What followed vindicates the framing rather than resolving it: both companies publicly attacked the EU's Digital Markets Act, which would force designated gatekeepers to open their platforms to competitors, and by 2024 experts were assessing whether the DOJ's Apple lawsuit makes a strong harm case even as proving market power looked hard. The through-line is that duopoly control of distribution has become the single most contested structure in consumer software.
First-order effects
- Developers pushing back on commissions — Valve, Netflix and peers cited in the 2018 report — gain a public-opinion template for arguing that distribution control, not just the 30% cut, is the core problem.
- Apple and Google are put on notice that their weekly reach of hundreds of millions of App Store users is itself the antitrust exposure: scale that looks like a moat reads as market power to enforcers.
Second-order effects
- Regulators converge on the same target from two directions — the EU's gatekeeper-designation route via the DMA and the DOJ's consumer-harm route — forcing Apple and Google to defend the same walled garden in multiple jurisdictions at once.
- If forced openness arrives, the commission economics modeled in the 2018 report become the next battleground: lower take rates shift value toward developers and whoever operates alternative distribution.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward contestable gatekeeping as the new regulatory default: platforms designated as bottlenecks lose unilateral control over distribution, payments, and sideloading, ending the era where two companies set the terms for all mobile software.
- For Apple specifically, compliance done punitively risks burning political and developer goodwill just as it needs both for new platforms like Vision Pro — meaning the cost of defending the duopoly compounds beyond mobile.
The trend: Mobile software distribution is moving from private duopoly control toward regulator-enforced contestability, with the DMA and DOJ litigation setting the terms Apple and Google once set alone.