A Call for Public Discussion about App Store Oligopoly

Over on the ACLU's Free Future blog, I just published an article titled Your Smartphone, Their Rules: How App Stores Enable Corporate-Government Censorship.

Free Software users and developers likely already understand the reasons why it matters who controls what tools you have access to. Hopefully this post can help clarify, even to people typically used to common non-free tooling, that there are real world risks to consolidated, proprietary control over computing and communication tools.

Big shout out to the projects out there doing good work in the "pocket supercomputer" space, providing an escape valve for many users and a counter-example to centralized corporate control, including F-Droid, GrapheneOS, and phosh.

The screws are tightening on user freedom, in the very place where most computing is happening today. The smartphone is already far too similar to an ankle monitor than it should be.

Please, publish your own suggestions on creative forms of mutual technical liberation. These are communications tools, so no person can fix the problems alone.

I would love to see a flourishing of non-Android, non-iOS systems in people's pockets, but i also know with the market the way it is, that is a long haul. Until that happens, we should also try to keep Android open, check out keepandroidopen.org for more suggestions.