iOS 17.4 is here, and with it comes an end to the iPhone business model that Steve Jobs envisioned. As the studio execs of golden age Hollywood used to say, ‘content is king but distribution is King Kong.’ Still true today. Whether it’s Standard Oil, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or iPhone, distribution has always been the attack point for government regulators, never the product. Teddy Roosevelt’s breakup of Standard Oil, the Paramount Decree of 1948 and now EU breaking up the Apple ecosystem. If there is one thing that always happens with heavy regulation is that it guts the business model: studios started shuttering cartoon divisions and continued shuttering studios into oblivion, railroads stopped investing in infrastructure, and so on.
I don’t believe for a moment this is about developer, user, or market freedom. If it was, Amazon would’t have been allowed to gobble up book distribution into the de-facto monopoly it enjoys everywhere today. It’s about private user data. EU governments can’t get the private data they want by asking Apple so it’s easier to get it by break up Apple’s closed ecosystem. From here on the digital ream is more about who controls what rather than creating the next big innovation. The app business model will be gutted. It was a good run, I feel lucky to have witnessed it.
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