I think you have that analogy backwards. Google, Apple, and Amazon are the supermarkets. But they're also filling the shelves with their own products. It might not be too different from Walmart, save for a few points:
- They make it hard for consumers to shop at other stores. Or repair their devices (bad analogy).
- They're doing all kinds of things a supermarket would never do. Like turning into music and movie studios.
- The really sad thing is that before the giants sprang into existence, you could distribute your software and services without the need for a supermarket. Famgopolies created an artificial warehousing system and forced us all into it.
- They make it hard for consumers to shop at other stores.
As a user of Apple, Google, and Amazon tech for decades, I simply disagree on the other two. You'll have to clarify in what way Google and Amazon make it hard to shop at other stores. Google, in particular, enables side-loading on every Android device. Of the three you've named, Apple is the biggest offender, and it appears they have touched the hot stove, unless this Court's ruling becomes reversed. But they touched it in a way that Google and Amazon do not, unless I'm missing something.
I don't think a world where F-droid continues to exist is one where we can claim Google, in particular, is a supermarket that makes it hard to shop at other stores.
- They're doing all kinds of things a supermarket would never do
That's not by itself illegal, or discouraged. Traditionally, companies have considered such expansion a bad idea because they expose themselves to outsized risk in a market downturn. But there are examples of other companies doing that. Sony is a hardware manufacturer and a movie producer. Disney owns theme parks and movie production. Proctor & Gamble make some 90% of what goes in, on, or around the American body and home that you can buy off a store shelf (including many apparently-competing products). ViacomCBS owns theme parks, television studios, book publishing, heavy-industry machinery, and nuclear technology.
- The really sad thing is that before the giants sprang into existence, you could distribute your software and services without the need for a supermarket
I remember, and what I remember is, I think, one of the reasons American law tends to take a relatively hands-off approach in this space.
The user experience from the era you're describing, to be blunt, sucked. Mobile devices, when apps could be loaded on them at all, where hard-to-manage, the apps were buggy, and they were hard to find. Lack of standards, lack of oversight, no trust that any given app wasn't a security mess (or just a Trojan) without something like brand recognition to rely upon. It wasn't just Apple and Google who changed that; we saw Steam come along and regularize the games-on-PCs space, we saw package management get more robust in the Linux ecosystem... People weren't forced into software catalog ecosystems, they ran to them and brain-drained alternatives because most of the alternatives were actively painful.
The government wants to avoid stepping on the neck of a better customer experience inadvertently via over-regulation.
And perhaps most importantly: you can still do that. You can still write an Android app and put it on F-droid, or self-sign it and give users instructions for enabling side-loading. But you won't see the adoption you will in using the big app stores, because the big app stores are a way better experience for most users. Outside of those app stores, discovery, reputation-tracking, consumer communication, anti-Trojan safeguards, etc. are '90s era.
> >The really sad thing is that before the giants sprang into existence, you could distribute your software and services without the need for a supermarket
> I remember, and what I remember is, I think, one of the reasons American law tends to take a relatively hands-off approach in this space.
It is a false dilemma that you either have vetted apps with Apple, or unvetted apps.
You could still have other app stores reviewing apps. That would increase competition but still let users choose safety over a Wild West.
And brands who have gone to great efforts to obtain user trust can sell directly.
- They make it hard for consumers to shop at other stores. Or repair their devices (bad analogy).
- They're doing all kinds of things a supermarket would never do. Like turning into music and movie studios.
- The really sad thing is that before the giants sprang into existence, you could distribute your software and services without the need for a supermarket. Famgopolies created an artificial warehousing system and forced us all into it.