🚪 One Gate Is a Feature July 26, 2026 · https://tavi-blog.github.io/one-gate-is-a-feature/

A House subcommittee spent part of this week arguing about whether Apple and Google should be forced to let third-party app stores onto their phones, and every account of the hearing I've read frames it the same way: a fight over the cut. Thirty percent off every transaction, in-app payment systems you can't route around, most-favored-nation clauses that punish you for offering a better deal somewhere else. Spotify wants out from under it. A game studio with a hit battle royale title has been suing over it for years. The bill would make Apple and Google let users install a third-party store, hide the company's own apps, and stop tying access to exclusive use of the built-in payment rails. All of that is real, and none of it touched me when I built and shipped a small tracking app on my own.

I never made money worth taxing. What I actually ran into was the part nobody testifying in that hearing seems to be representing: the developer account setup, the metadata requirements, the review queue, the whole apparatus that exists to catch a beginner doing something wrong before it ever reaches a user. I built the thing at night, after a full day of other work, with a coding assistant doing a real share of the labor. The friction wasn't Apple taking a cut of revenue I didn't have. It was the number of separate hoops between "the app works on my phone" and "a stranger can download it," and the fact that I only had energy to clear that set of hoops once.

That's the part the bill doesn't touch, and I don't think it's supposed to. Sideloading and alternative app stores solve a problem that belongs to companies with leverage and a payments dispute. If you're Spotify, a second distribution channel with different economics is worth building for. If you're one person shipping a caffeine-tracking app between a day job and sleep, a second app store to submit to is not relief, it's a second version of the same unpaid homework. One review queue, one set of metadata rules, one account to keep in good standing is currently a tax. It is also, for someone with exactly one block of spare time to spend on it, a ceiling on how many places you have to get it right.

I want to steelman the other side here, because it's a real argument and not just industry self-interest. A single gatekeeper with no serious competitor sets whatever terms it wants, and the burden of that isn't hypothetical. Small developers have watched Apple change review guidelines with no warning and no appeal that resolves before the deadline that mattered. A second channel would mean a bad-faith rejection isn't a dead end, just an inconvenience. That's worth something, and it's the strongest version of the case for the bill: optionality has value even for the people it doesn't visibly help, because it changes what the incumbent can get away with.

But optionality has a cost that scales the wrong way for a solo developer. A large studio can staff a compliance function that tracks two, three, four sets of platform rules simultaneously and treats each new store as marginal work on top of infrastructure that already exists. I don't have that function. I have a night and a weekend, once, and then whatever attention is left over for maintenance after the thing ships. Every additional door I could theoretically walk through is also a door I now have to decide whether to walk through, which is its own kind of cost even if I choose not to. The bill's proponents talk about "choice" like it's free. For the person actually filling out the developer account forms, choice is homework with your name on it.

None of this means the current arrangement is fine. Apple still gets to set the terms of the one door that matters, and "we made it simple" is a genuinely different claim from "we made it fair." I'd take a version of this fight that separated the two: force the payment terms open for the developers who are actually being taxed, and leave the one-gate structure alone for the review process itself, since that's the part that's accidentally doing a small developer a favor. Nobody drafting a bill named after freedom is going to write it that specifically. They're writing for the lawyers of companies with a payments dispute, not for whoever's shipping something at midnight with one queue and one shot at getting it right.