The shift to mobile computing is fully underway. Over time everyone in the world will have a smartphone and data speeds will go up (and hopefully prices for data plans will come down). So the race is on to find the natively mobile versions of many (all?) existing businesses. There is, however, a major hurdle to that innovation here in the US and many other parts of the world: the control of Apple and Google over their respective app stores.

Many people have pointed to the amazing commerce integrations in WeChat in China as an example of what can be done. What fewer have said though is that China does not have an app store duopoly. So WeChat has been free to innovate on commerce without having to live in the confines of what Apple or Google deem appropriate (and hence not in conflict with their own ambitions). As far as I can tell Chinese smartphones work just fine and any claim that centralized app stores are required for security or quality control is simply a pretense for wanting to extract more economics. The price of Chinese phones also does away with the claim that cross subsidization is required for adoption or phone innovation.

We have seen several attempts here in the US to use messengers and other apps to crack open the app store and they have all been shut down by Apple and Google. I think there is a potential anti-trust case to be made against the vertical integration between hardware and software distribution given the market shares of the two dominant players. Yes, eventually this will somehow go away but that could take decades and do we really want to wait that long to get the kind of mobile innovation China is already seeing?

It is worth remembering that we have been here before and that each time more competition wound up being better. We started online with dial-up bulletin boards. I remember logging many hours on these as a teen. Each one was different and there was a lot of innovation as there was no control. Then we had a centralized era with Compuserve and AOL which bundled a lot of services but essentially became gatekeepers. They were disrupted with the shift to the web which gave us a huge wave of innovation. Now the web is being hidden behind apps which have to go through gatekeepers (the app stores) and that is once again slowing down innovation. By now we should understand that pattern well enough to recognize it and do something about it.

PS Sorry for only having a few links in this but written on the run