The Verge is actually doing it. Actually connecting the dots between the fascistic tendencies of app stores with the profit motives of their proprietors.
FINALLY.
The open web has been roadkill in the profit games the mobile duopoly has set up, muscled out of view with policies and choices that were designed to leave no fingerprints. But we can all see it clearly now:
https://www.theverge.com/policy/859902/apple-google-run-by-cowards
@slightlyoff What is most painful is Google's recent effective ban on @fdroidorg , an "app store" which actually has stated principles and which adheres to them.
@alison @fdroidorg Android was always compromised in exactly this way, and it's why the Android/Play axis internally have been so underhanded (and effective) at suppressing the web as a competing app platform, even though it has the power to disrupt Apple too.
Google's more interested in taxing the gambling-adjacent behaviour of whales in "casual" games for the other 80% of the market than it is in any sort of ethical or principled stand. I wrote about it in this piece:
@slightlyoff Let's not forget Zuckerberg and Musk are cowards, too.
@slightlyoff I used Report a problem in the App Store for the X app to report illegal content, child porn.
Not that I think it will make any difference but if Apple get a larger number of reports from different sources it might be difficult for them to ignore the issue.
> Apple argued that an indie storefront that users could install via Epic was a problem because it hosted porny games, calling games on Itch.io “offensive and sexualized.”
> You know what’s “offensive and sexualized,” you worthless fucking cowards? Nonconsensual AI-generated images of women in bikinis spreading their legs
@slightlyoff
This piece by Elizabeth Lopatto is a huge service to us all. It cleary and searingly says the true thing (even if in question form): Apple and Google's claims that they should rule our phones *because they can be trusted to* are bullshit. Always have been. And the truly caustic thing is that the corruption eating these companies is eating our democracy too:
https://infrequently.org/2025/10/the-app-store-was-always-authoritarian/
@slightlyoff
I do agree, that the power that these companies represent does erode democracies.
But I do not see the corruption eating these companies. They work as intended. They are ruled top down by people that have no interest in democracy, no affiliation with community (aside from their obscenely over-rich buddies).
The corruption lies in us for allowing them to hold the whips and make us accept their whims. For not seeing through their lies. For taking on their libertarian ideology.
