Apple is a terrible choice for gatekeeper because they stand to benefit from any app becoming popular, regardless of why the app has become popular. Gambling-i

Apple is a terrible choice for gatekeeper because they stand to benefit from any app becoming popular, regardless of why the app has become popular. Gambling-inducing gem scams and apps with fake reviews do just fine and earn Apple 30% at the expense of users so Apple certainly loses money in the short term if they refuse those apps entirely. Apple also gains when they can brag on stage about how many bazillion apps there are on Apple platforms; scam apps are generally quite numerous (probably because it’s easier to come up with a bunch of crappy apps than a single good one) so they’re sort-of-OK with having lots of “apps” that no one should really be installing. A really tiny list of outstanding apps would be hard to sell on stage. The only real impact on Apple’s bottom line would be for the entire store to become so infested, relative to competitors, that people jump ship and stop buying expensive Apple hardware out of frustration. Apple is at least observant enough to avoid that; they’ve kept their store clearly better than competing stores but none of them is necessarily a great experience. I strongly suspect that the convenience of payment processing is the primary reason for developers to put up with Apple’s too-random screening systems. If Apple were required to open up app payment processing to any number of payment services, and if they were relying on trusted 3rd parties to certify apps (perhaps based on category), we would see a very different app experience. Distributing reviews to different authorities would also be hard. For example, if you had “security experts” handle screening for apps in a certain category, somebody could just write a sneaky app in a different, weakly-reviewed category to make it through the net into the store. Apple would almost have to create secure subsets of their entire API in line with app store categories, e.g. “you can’t even use network-access APIs for apps in this category” would be a very useful restriction. The other nice thing about this is that Apple would finally be free to not need certain expertise in-house; e.g. if you don’t have enough good people on staff who are qualified to assess the security risks of an app but you can find a trusted 3rd party that can, you can hire them to be that trusted authority and we can stop assuming that Apple is the best at handling everything by itself.