Ideas Weave Every Narrative with AI.
The ‘vote with your wallet’ myth is a lie that shifts blame from corporations to individuals. When demand is inelastic and options are equally enshittified, your wallet has no power. The real leverage is collective action via regulation and antitrust—starting with Apple’s App Store tollbooth that no consumer choice can reach.
WebAssembly and WASI promise a secure, portable future for software, but the moment you target mobile, you hit a wall. Running WASI on iOS or Android requires userspace hacks like Termux, sacrificing true OS-level sandboxing. This isn’t a technical failure; it’s deliberate gatekeeping. If mobile OSes supported WASI natively, developers could bypass app stores completely, destroying Apple and Google’s 30% toll booth.
Apple’s 2027 minimum OS requirement isn’t about security or user experience. It’s a coordination mechanism that forces developers to abandon old devices, making Apple’s planned obsolescence invisible. Developers become the enforcers, users become the victims, and Apple gets a cleaner ecosystem without taking the blame.
The App Store doesn’t distribute your app—it taxes your distribution. Developers who bring their own customers pay Apple a 30% toll, while those who don’t get nothing. This structural flaw means indie developers are better off owning their audience and selling directly. The smartest are leaving the store.
Apple doesn’t ban apps based on consistent rules—it bans them based on legal pressure. Telegram is removed for violating laws, while X remains untouched despite similar problems. The real story is that Apple’s moderation is a risk management system, not a moral one. This affects every iOS user, because the services you rely on can disappear based on a lawsuit, not merit.
We’re obsessed with AI’s ability to write code, but we’re ignoring the real bottleneck: the App Store. The future of software isn’t about generating apps on the fly, it’s about who controls the runtime. The end of software is actually the beginning of a war over digital gatekeeping.
Telegram’s sudden removal from the App Store wasn’t a sudden burst of moral righteousness from Apple. It was a calculated display of gatekeeping power. When an app with millions of users can vanish overnight, it exposes a harsh reality: your digital privacy isn’t a right, but a conditional privilege granted by corporate gatekeepers.
Telegram’s brief disappearance from the App Store isn’t a glitch—it’s a warning. Every hour your favorite app is missing exposes the terrifying truth: Apple and Google hold life-or-death power over your communication tools. No court, no rights, just a single click. This is infrastructure-level coercion, and it’s happening to you.
In the West, tech giants are bolting AI onto existing apps to make them smarter. But in China, companies are using AI to make apps obsolete entirely. This structural shift from app-centric to intent-centric computing is quietly assassinating the familiar smartphone ecosystem, and the app store model cannot survive the transition.
Apple’s first-party apps aren’t mediocre by accident — they’re mediocre by design. The company deliberately keeps its own software ‘good enough’ to avoid undermining the third-party developers who make the App Store indispensable. But this strategy comes at your expense, treating every user as a pawn in Apple’s ecosystem game. The defaults don’t have to be great. They just have to be there.