Plus, in the case of App Stores, this also means device vendors (Apple, in particular) end up being forced to provide tech support for people who have problems installing apps from third-party operations. Sure, Apple might not have a legal responsibility to sort these problems out, but it is a company with relatively ethical values and will no doubt spend time trying to help its customers. That’s a cadre of free tech support for those third-party app stores — profitable for them, but at the cost of higher running costs for Apple and a degraded user experience for the rest of us.
Today’s report doesn’t go into all of this, of course. But it’s hard not to see how its criticisms point to the logical conclusion that far from benefitting consumers, App Store liberalization has simply exposed them to potential fraud and other harms, inconsistent user experiences, security threats — all so a few more dollars can land in the laps of the multi-millionaires who paid so much cold hard cash to lobbyists, politicians, and PRs to complain about the so-called “Apple Tax.”
Wake up, people: These folks didn’t resent that so-called tax because you paid it; they resented it because they didn’t get to keep all of it.
This story originally appeared on Computerworld
