They want platform providers (Apple with iOS and Google with Android) to get out of the way. They are both providing platforms, as well as market places, as well as competing apps/services.
How do they expect those competing platforms to be delivered? If via side loading through a website then we’ve already seen them complain about Google having warnings for that.
If through the app stores themselves then they’re essentially asking for discoverability, hosting, and distribution of their products for free.
At what point does a company deserve the right to compete with you on your own product? If Amazon continues to engulf online shopping can another company eventually sue to have their own store listings put on Amazon with no money going to Amazon?
To me these two situations aren’t that different. Apple and Google have each built hardware and software systems for their services. Other companies like Samsung have developed their own app stores that they distribute on their phones. If Epic wants to be a service provider then there are already charted pathways to doing so that don’t involve suing over service fees you already agreed to.
> At what point does a company deserve the right to compete with you on your own product?
I get where you're coming from, I do -- but the answer to your question is somewhere around "when that company controls access to billions of eyeballs around the planet".
These companies have greater access to and control of people than any government. They are beyond review, beyond accountability, and beyond reach. They are dictatorships controlling access to billions of people, the kind of power that would make any dictator in history blush.
And I am not saying we should take from them all their power. They DID earn it, it's true and most of it is quite benign. But... giving them absolute power over who everyone in the world can do business with, just because they chose to buy that device (probably not knowing what the limitations would be)? For the sake of the future of the entire species I should think that this is not a situation we would consider ideal.
If the companies have become too large then I feel that’s really the responsibility of anti-trust regulators to address rather than the courts making a ruling that you have to let other companies sell their services in your store.
Unless things have changed in the past couple of years it's not just a single security warning the first time you side load an app. On my device, F-Droid can't seem to update apps itself - rather I get a security warning dialog for _every single app_ whenever I do updates. This is in spite of the fact that I approved the initial security warning when installing the F-Droid apk itself and granted it all of the permissions it requested.
