You can tell the Google Play app store doesn’t have your best interest in mind since it doesn’t allow filtering for free apps, or apps that don’t have ads, or apps that don’t push in-app purchases on you. There is no way to prioritize apps that were created by a kind soul without a profit motive. Google isn’t alone: It’s the same for Apple’s app store.
I’m not the first person to note that Google and Apple aren’t interested in prioritizing free apps. It’s also thoroughly unsurprising. You wouldn’t expect a bookshop to highlight free magazines on their shelves, or a supermarket to put up signs in their bottled water aisle reminding you that tap water is free.
The weird thing is that while I don’t mind a bookshop not advertising free books, or a supermarket not advertising free water, the inability to easily find free apps in the app store does make me angry. It’s weird because I don’t fully understand why. Aren’t those things equivalent?
I’m not the only one: Consider, for example, this essay by Dynomight. It’s a rant, albeit an entertaining and eloquent one, about Google intentionally making their phones worse for consumers. Or consider Cory Doctorow’s book-length rant on the same topic. Why get upset by corporations putting their self-interest above their customers’?
I think one reason is that bookstores and supermarkets are constrained in how badly they can treat consumers, since there’s plenty of competition. If they go too far, they’ll go out of business. Google and Apple have, to a large extent, freed themselves from this constraint by having a mobile operating system duopoly.
There is also a sense of betrayal. Technology seems like it should make consumers more powerful, and when that doesn’t happen, we feel let down. This is particularly acute for marketplaces like Google Play and the Apple app store, which are commonly understood to be marketplaces. Marketplaces are supposed to match buyers and sellers in a way that maximizes benefits to both. The way app stores are designed is to benefit first the marketplace itself, and then sellers. The benefit to buyers is a distant third consideration.
Given the importance of the topic, there is surprisingly little discussion about what the right balance for a corporation between maximizing shareholder value and maximizing consumers’ interests is. Some corporations don’t have to answer that question since the two align reasonably well. In all other cases, there are no ready-made answers.
