Comment by dilap

Yeah, I agree. Without the monopoly, the censorship isn't hugely important (except maybe important to you as a site user, or as an interesting cultural trend).

I do think app platforms are natural monopolies, so I wonder if the best thing to do is regulate them somehow to ensure openness. E.g., require any app to be installable that does not actually do illegal things.

It's seems kind of heavy-handed, but the current situation of Apple heavily restricting the kinds of apps we can have seems very non-ideal to me, too...

(The web is a great escape hatch for all of this, as pointed out by some other commentators, but I think native is where the action is, and it'd be nice to have web-levels of freedom there, too.)