Skype Vanishes from App Stores in China, Including Apple’s
This sort of thing represents one of the true dangers of single-source App Stores on general purpose computers with no side-loading fallback, and is why we should be proactively working to make it illegal. It&#x27;s not that Apple is malicious per se, or even that they&#x27;re particularly slow at reviews or whatever (though that has been the case at times too), but the mere fact that they represent a single, easy to pressure choke point. Apple themselves have reacted to this appropriately when it comes to the hardware by removing more and more of their own ability to affect it once it&#x27;s been sold and giving that power to the owners instead. That&#x27;s not just a positive for owners&#x27; privacy and security (and in turn a selling point), it also reduces Apple&#x27;s exposure and liability. If they don&#x27;t hold a given set of data or power in the first place, then nobody can go after them for it.<p>Unfortunately on the software side they have not sought any of the better tradeoffs available between security and vetting vs owner power and decentralization, and in turn find themselves in the crosshairs for every single app. Not even just from governments though they&#x27;re most coercive, but from any public cultural&#x2F;religious interest group at all. Since Apple has to approve everything, Apple is also seen (correctly) as directly responsible for everything on the App Store. The result has been exactly as you&#x27;d expect: they&#x27;re more conservative on average about what sort of content they&#x27;ll allow, not merely about objective issues like security.<p>Perhaps negative PR from actions like this might be sufficient eventually to get Apple to change course on their own. They wouldn&#x27;t actually need to do very much, even selling a one-time permanent single device signing cert might be sufficient [1], and could form the basis of alternate App Stores even. But if Apple (and others) won&#x27;t move it should be legislated. Improving wearable displays will ultimately mean the merger of &quot;mobile&quot; and &quot;PC&quot;, that is the next disruptive evolution in computers. We should not allow that to become the end of bazaars for software too.<p>----<p>1: Right now they have a free one, but it only lets apps run for 7 days, and the developer one is yearly and subscription based.