Steve Jobs’ original vision for the App Store was a curated, hand picked selection of apps that ran seamlessly on iPhones—giving users a smooth and secure experience. This was necessary at the beginning.
Even so, it is highly improbable that Apple will do much more to be friendlier to platforms and creators unless the government forces them to. Why? They have a great business. Apple has a hardware monopoly over a specific set of consumers, and they’ve leveraged that into a monopoly on payments conducted on those devices.
We’re not the first to critique Apple’s policies. But most debates about Apple center on the harm they cause to developers, and instead we think the far larger impact is on creators: the millions of people that could be earning more money and connecting with their fans.