Either government has to intervene and make the marketplace competitive, or we'll have to spend a decade or more routing around the app duopoly. I used to thin

Either government has to intervene and make the marketplace competitive, or we'll have to spend a decade or more routing around the app duopoly. I used to think we could build a new platform in a sandbox on top of the old platforms (like a browser), but the duopoly has gotten so confidently aggressive that they'll squash out of existence any new platform before it has a chance to grow. I actually thought Expo (the React Native runtime) had a chance to do this "platform on a platform" thing, but Apple wouldn't even allow their debug tool to exist once they realized you could preview apps by plugging a URL into their runtime client, and that those apps were actually good. So yeah: government intervention, or a few decades of lost progress and value creation. Thankfully for those of us still living in a democracy, we get some choice in the matter.