[appstorelottery]

I see your point. From the user's immediate perspective, getting a coin flip without an extra click is undeniably easier. But that's zooming in so close that you miss the entire picture.

The real question is what happens when that logic is applied to everything. First, it's a coin toss. Then it's the weather. Then a calculator. Then flight prices. Then hotel bookings. Then product reviews.

Step by step, the platform that was built to be a portal to a rich and diverse ecosystem of creators becomes a wall that primarily shows you its own products. The "progress" you're describing is the progress of a single entity consuming the ecosystem that once fed it.

The ultimate harm to the consumer isn't a slightly less convenient coin toss; it's the eventual death of that vibrant, competitive ecosystem. My tiny app was simply the first course in the platform's long meal of consuming its own creators.

[shadowgovt]

Yes, this is entirely possible. It's why American law generally centers anti-trust on consumer harm as the litmus test; if those hotel bookings all have to go through one place, and as a result the hotels are too expensive, that's an issue. This is why Amazon gets to exist (but has now been sued in 2023 because the FTC is seeing behavior that is probably rent extraction).

If Google started charging a quarter a coin-flip while leveraging its control over search to suppress the fact you'd made a coin-flip app that was free or flat-rate to purchase, there might be a case there under US law.

[appstorelottery]

I appreciate your comment, it drove me down a rabbit hole :-)

You were right that under the old interpretation, my app had no case. But that rabbit hole led me to the news that the interpretation itself has just been successfully challenged.

Judge Mehta found Google liable. The court has officially validated that the 'free vs. free' self-preferencing that killed my app is, in fact, illegal monopoly maintenance.

Fascinating to see a legal system's 'unhandled exception' get patched in real time.

p.s. Respect for your public comments here :-)