There’s absolutely nothing fundamental in the App Store concept that requires it to be the only pathway for software on the iPhone. But limiting things to the App Store gave Apple complete control of its new software platform, which in those early days was very much still under construction. I understand why Apple had that impulse, why it wanted to protect what it was building, and why it didn’t want the iPhone to be defined by software in any way that Apple didn’t agree with.

But over time, the inevitable happened: Apple used the exclusivity of the App Store and its total control over the platform to extract money through rent-seeking and to bar businesses from admitting that the web existed outside their apps. Perhaps worst of all, the App Store’s exclusivity allowed Apple to essentially treat app developers as Apple employees, forcing them to follow Apple’s guidelines and please Apple’s approval apparatus before their apps would be allowed to be seen by the public. Whole classes of apps were banned entirely, some publicly, some silently.

Enough said.