If you’re someone who still watches cable television, you may have seen commercials recently that say something along the lines of liberals are attacking the tech industry, liberals are taking away the tools small businesses need to survive, liberals are ruining your two-day shipping or, the best one, liberals are threatening national security.
Of course, these commercials never say how or why “liberals” are doing these things.
So what’s going on?
Congress is considering two bills: the Open App Markets Act and the American Choice and Innovation Online Act, the latter of which we’ll discuss tomorrow.
The Open App Markets Act (which we’ll shorten to App Act) addresses the stranglehold app stores have on third-party apps. An app, or application, is a program on your phone or computer that connects to another party. If you have a smart phone or computer, you probably have an app to access your email, but you may have apps that take you directly to certain retailers or allow you to play games.
The App Act does four major things:
First, it requires app stores of over 50 million U.S.-based users to allow “sideloading,” or downloading apps from places other than the official app store. Currently, there is really only one way to get apps: You download/purchase them from either the Apple App store or the Google Play store. Apple users can only download apps from the Apple App store; Android/Microsoft users can download apps from small, third-party app stores or from websites, but it’s not easy to do. The App Act will force Apple to allow sideloading and make it easier to do so on Android.
Second, it requires Apple App and Google Play to allow apps to use in-app payment systems that do not go through the app store. Right now, if you play a game on your phone and you want to buy more lives or power-ups, the purchase most likely goes through your account in the Apple or Google Play stores. So it would appear on your bill as “Apple in-app purchase,” for example. But, when the payment goes through the app store, the app store takes a commission of up to 30%. The App Act would force app store to allow third-party apps to use their own payment systems for in-app purchases, bypassing the mandatory commission.
Third, it prevents Apple and Google from prioritizing their own apps or their subsidiaries’ apps in the app store unless it’s marked as an advertisement. For example, if you search “video watching apps” in Google Play, it can’t arbitrarily make YouTube and YouTube-related apps the top results just because the company that owns Google also owns YouTube; but it could make YouTube the top result if it marked that result as an advertisement. The App Act also prevents app stores from punishing third-party developers for listing apps on other app stores and/or for offering those apps for different prices in different app stores.
Finally, it stops app stores from collecting non-public data about users from a third-party app in order to compete with that app. A made-up example might be that if you like match-three games, Google Play can’t use the data about how long you spend playing Candy Crush to advertise a different match-three game from a company Google is partnered with.
The primary goal of the Open App Markets Act is to break the duopoly Apple and Google have on app stores that allow them to prioritize their own products over competitors and take a sizeable chunk of third-party apps’ revenue and to allow small app stores to break into the market.
The primary concern among opponents of the bill focuses on that last part. Apps that go through the Apple App and Google Play stores generally have to meet certain quality and cyber safety standards. This usually prevents apps from infecting your phone or computer with malware or viruses. A 2020 Nokia study that found Android devices account for more than 26% of malware infections (which jumped to more than 50% in 2021), as compared to Apple devices’ 1.72%, ostensibly because Android users do have some ability to sideload apps.
However, just because someone has the ability to sideload an app doesn’t mean they have to. And one provision in a bill that merely gives users other options is no reason to scrap the entire piece of legislation.
