A great article with some very good points. 1) should be kind of obvious and easy to do, but especially 3) and 4) are extremely important in my eyes. The bigge

A great article with some very good points. 1) should be kind of obvious and easy to do, but especially 3) and 4) are extremely important in my eyes. The biggest restriction on iOS (and on iPadOS, but for simplicity, I will only use the term "iOS") is the requirement to go through the App Store approval process. The justification is the promise of security and curation of app quality. First of all, those are two separate things and shouldn't mixed up. Second, in my eyes, Apple fails at both of them. Of course, I don't know how many truly horrible apps (from a security point of view) are rejected by the process, but there are enough examples, where dubious apps made it past the review process. But the elephant in the room - no its actually a diploducus - is the so-called curation. On the one side, there are tons of very useful apps which cannot be submitted, just think of Termux, by the app store rules. On the other side, Apple does have zero restraint approving all those games which only are a vehicle of selling in-app purchases. Furthermore, they sell the prices for amounts which should be considered fraudulent. If you buy a AAA-title for your computer or console, at most you pay $50-$100. How can it be allowed that even the most basic games sell in-app purchases which can amount to several hundred dollars or even more without any limit? That is plain immoral in my eyes. But Apple allows this. Worse even, they seem to quite support this, as the whole App Store design has driven most other game styles from the platform. On the other side, a lot of useful apps get disallowed from the App Store just for certain "rules". Another bad example is the App Store search. When searching for an app, you get paid for app placements in the search result before the results which best matched your search. Germany released a covid-19 tracing app yesterday, but a simple search yielded my everything but that app. Only when searching for the exact app name, I got to it. This is bad with general legit apps, a disaster in this specific case. In consequence, I do think Apple should urgently overthink their App Store approach. Otherwise, legislators should enforce an opening of the platform. Towards using private APIs: while it totally makes sense to develop APIs by co-developing them with the apps which use them as a test case for the APIs, in general, they should be opened up to all apps. Not doing so is not only unfair competition, but dumb in the long term, as it encourages the existence of semi-maintained APIs for internal applications. And harms the quality of third party apps.