[American biased post, because that’s what I know and where I am]
Been screaming that capitalism is not the problem you are experiencing. Monopolies, or more to the point, cartels, have exploded in scope over the past 40-years. Think of a company you hate, a company that’s fucking you over, a company that’s fucking us ALL over. Bet they fit the bill.
Hate your job at Lowe’s? Go to Home Depot! wait… There’s a great family-owned, local hardware store, but I can’t afford to shop there.
Walgreens piss you off? Just go to CVS! well damn… New local pharmacy chain is really nice! They can’t take my insurance.
If you’re under 40, or maybe even under 50, I cannot relate how alien this all is, the words fail me. If you’re in your 20s or 30s, it’s easy to think it was always like this. Oh hell no it was not.
Along with allowing corporations unlimited political “speech”, i.e. campaign contributions, the proliferation of cartels will go down in history as America’s failing point. (Basically the same thing?)
News like the current entertainment mergers didn’t fucking happen. And here on lemmy we’re talking, with a straight face, about the ups and downs of the Netflix/Warner Bros./HBO merger. And if you’ll remember, Warner Bros./Time Warner/AOL was the largest merger in US history!
Google based Android off Linux. Apple based IOS off BSD. Both of those were the result of collaborative work between thousands of millions of contributors.
Frameworks exist that assist in making apps for either or both, just like they exist to build games for multiple consoles etc.
Meanwhile, Google has now declared that they will require developers register signing key WITH THEM in order to make software that will run on Android (regardless of whether it’s installed via their store or another) and has been taking steps away from providing the the necessary codebase under AOSP etc that allow for third-party projects that were based on Android
Google has also transitioned readily to “rent” based services such as YouTube while killing off Google Play Music etc (such actually allowed purchases/downloads of media). Both companies are already heavily investing in generative AI.
Do you think that once they have control of all app signing they’ll allow apps that circumvent their advertising or data-harvesting?
This doesn’t “make sense”, it makes us pay more to a digital landlord who throws around their weight to lock us in further and further while using their increasing wealth to buy up or crush all the competition. We’re accepting chains of convenience today in trade for restrictions and exploitation tomorrow.
I can think of one company that holds a dominating market position and has been somewhat benevolent, and that’s Valve. They don’t buy out competition, they’ve been active contributors to open-source (to the extent that they’ve made gaming on Linux actually viable and good), and they often seem listen to their customers in order to improve. They still do take a goodly % of sales revenue from developers who list with them though.