Their biggest selling point is regulated app stores…

sound of jail bars crashing shut as Android cuts all the indie developers out of the market

It’s shit the government should be doing

The joke of it all is that government does do stuff. But it's mostly to cement the existing duopoly.

Government contractors dump hundreds of billions of dollars into licensing for the dominant OS. Government regulators are fully captured by industry lobbyists, building their rules around policies the businesses have decided on internally. Policing agencies focus almost entirely on small fish, foreign developers, and whistleblowers. Courts use a one-size-fits-all financial punishment guidance, which can easily bankrupt a small business but is barely more than a speedbump for mega-corporations.

Nobody seriously talks about Breaking Up The Tech Companies via Antitrust Laws. Nobody talks about making Open-Source Code more regulatory friendly or investing more public dollars in Open-Source development / deployments. We can't even seriously talk about insourcing chip production or building out competitors to Intel and TSMC.

The Big Lie of modern left/right political discourse is that American political institutions are doing Too Much or Not Enough. The bitter truth is that if you're any kind of threat to the domestic business cartels... well... just ask TikTok what happens next.

They're really astroturfing youtube ads right now (I know, ick, youtube, and I should use plugins; I normally don't use it at all but lately I've had a couple songs I've been listening too on repeat. I should just download them).

Like, almost every fucking ad is "some apps are traps, can you spot the trap" with these stupid cartoony characters representing apps and suddenly one (at random, with no rhyme or reason) blows up and the narrator says "google play can."

Like fuck off, google play says whatever they want to say is a trap is a trap. Meanwhile they allow all these predatory BS apps on their store. They'll let you fall for the traps they approve of. And they won't even show you what country an app developer is based in until after you download it.

But they're trying to give people this false sense of security like "oh, I can trust anything on the play store" while also making them suspicious/hesitant to use any alternative app repos. It's clearly an attempt to manufacture consent for their ecosystem lockdown, and unfortunately it will probably work. They're targeting easily-influenced young people with these supposedly "cute" (yet honestly kinda gross) characters.

Software repositories are already perfect!

All the regulation they do such as age verification is mandated by governments.