Apple's App Store policies are a big mistake

The company can't explain what it's doing because it genuinely doesn't make sense

(Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images)

One of the non-politics things I like to follow is Apple-centric media, and it’s been kind of disconcerting to watch as the grumbling about the way the App Store works crosses the line from developers to the business press, then into the legal sphere, and then into mainstream media via Farhad Manjoo’s column denouncing “the Apple Tax.”

The basic issue here, if you haven’t been following it, is that when the iPhone was first introduced it had a small share of the cell phone market (which at the time was largely non-smart), and it introduced a paradigm for installing apps on the phones that was very different from how computers normally work. Instead of installing arbitrary software via download or physical disk, you installed software specifically sold by an Apple-controlled store. This model was actually pretty similar to how most other cell phones at the time worked, except if you wanted to install software on your Razr, you had to go to…