Imagine downloading one app that lets you play a bunch of games like “Candy Crush” and “World of Warcraft.” Xbox made an iPhone app like that, but Apple never let you try it. Instead you download and pay for each game app separately.
What you can and can’t do with your apps is dictated by Apple and Google rule books that are longer than the U.S. Constitution.
The companies say their control gives you one place to find apps while protecting you from bad apps that could steal your money or your personal information. (Their protections are good but imperfect.)
Those rules also help Apple and Google steer the internet economy and generate more than $40 billion in yearly revenue from their app stores.
Apps are so handy, and Apple and Google demand so much silence, that it’s hard to know what money-saving deals or imaginative ideas you might be missing.
Now, because of legal changes starting to bubble up for Europeans and Americans, you can start to glimpse an alternative app reality.
Those first glimmers, including complicated changes that Apple announced Thursday for iPhone users in the European Union, won’t immediately and dramatically change your app experiences.
Eventually, though, you could have more options to download apps, pay less to buy digital stuff from apps and use features that weren’t possible before. Or very little might change, because Apple and Google won’t loosen their iron grip without a fight.
You can buy a blender at many stores. Apps haven’t worked that way.
If you’re in the United States and have an Android phone, peek at Spotify’s app. It was one of the first Android apps to give you a side-by-side choice when you make a digital purchase.
You can tap to buy a Spotify subscription by paying Google — which is how you might buy other app things like special levels in “Candy Crush.” Or you can tap a different button to enter your credit card information and buy the subscription from Spotify.
If you buy with Spotify, the first month of your subscription is free. If you pay Google, you get a different deal for new subscribers and accumulate rewards points to redeem for stuff like freebies in other apps. It’s your call.
In Spotify’s iPhone app, you can’t buy anything — you’ll see no discounts, nada.
The Spotify app choice in Android may not wow you, but it’s a crack in the app store status quo.
Consider that you can buy a blender from many different stores. But if you want to download an app, you have been able to get it only from Apple or Google, with some complicated exceptions.
And generally if you have bought something digital from an app — a streaming video subscription, an online fitness class or an audiobook — you’ve had to buy it from Apple or Google.
(If that purchase is a physical good like a DVD, an in-person fitness class or a paperback book, Apple and Google have nothing to do with it.)
It works this way because Apple said so 15 years ago, Google mostly followed and they stuck to it even as lines have blurred between the virtual and physical worlds.
The halting changes coming to your apps
Apple is now being forced to let people in the European Union download iPhone apps from places other than the official app store. That’s a first. Apple emphasized, with some justification, that this could be risky for you.
In Europe and the United States, Apple has proposed for the first time to let you click a link in apps like Spotify to buy subscriptions or other digital goods from Spotify’s website.
One problem: Apple’s proposals so far are so unappealing to some app makers that none of these app changes might happen. We’ll see if regulators push back.
For iPhone users anywhere in the world, you might be able to play a bunch of games from one app, as Xbox tried to offer several years ago. (Several app companies I spoke with were confused how Apple’s proposal to comply with new laws might affect their apps or you.)
Android app rules will change, too, under the same European law and as a result of a proposed legal settlement and court verdict reached last month in the United States. In America, for example, Google has proposed giving all apps the choice — as Spotify did under a special arrangement — to give you side-by-side payment options.
Apple and Google aren’t giving up their app control or their $40 billion annual app haul.
Some app makers have howled, including on Thursday, that Apple and Google are twisting legally mandated app changes to their benefit. They say Apple and Google are not giving you real choices to download apps or cheaper options to pay for digital stuff. Some Apple and Google critics worry that the companies will further enrich themselves and have more, not less, control over your apps.
I can’t predict how this will shake out for you. But after years of app dysfunction, any changes — no matter how messy and imperfect — feel like the potential beginnings of a fresh app spring.
