Americans benefit every day from the world’s most dynamic, secure, and innovative mobile platforms—Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. These ecosystems launched mobile e-commerce and continue to fuel its unprecedented growth, empowering countless entrepreneurs and enabling powerful parental controls to protect children online. But some lawmakers now want to put others in charge—namely, Washington bureaucrats and companies who have never built such valuable digital properties.
Rep. Kat Cammack’s (R-Fla.) App Store Freedom Act—framed as a pro-competition bill and a child-safety initiative—is neither. As colleagues and I have written, it borrows heavily from the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, a sweeping regulatory regime that has slowed innovation and created privacy and security problems across the EU.
The legislation would require Apple and Google to open their platforms to other developers and to accommodate them at no cost. That means granting access to core operating system functions and allowing unvetted third-party apps. These mandates would strip platform creators of the very tools they use to ensure safety, privacy, and performance.
If passed, the law would give government attorneys and private companies—who have never built a digital platform—control over important platform features. And when things go wrong, it’s Apple, Google, and their customers who will suffer the consequences, not the regulators or rivals.
Think of it this way: Imagine if regulators in the pre–e-commerce era decided Walmart had too much influence over retail. Instead of allowing it to run its stores as it saw fit, the government would require it to let fly-by-night vendors set up booths, undermining quality controls and customer trust. If those vendors sold defective products or walked away with customers’ money, Walmart—not the pop-up scammers—would shoulder the blame.
In the digital realm, we’ve seen what that looks like. Unscrupulous crypto exchanges like FTX and QuadrigaCX collapsed after pilfering users’ money. The App Store Freedom Act could usher in similar vulnerabilities by eroding platform vetting processes and security protocols.
Proponents of the bill argue that it promotes competition. But research tells a different story. In our most recent analysis, we found that when Apple’s apps compete with third-party developers, Apple’s innovations result in increased downloads for the third-party apps about a third of the time and have no net competitive impact more than half the time. Meanwhile, the biggest non-Apple app providers take business from their smaller rivals at twice the rate of Apple. If Apple is forced to hand over platform controls to these firms, their dominance will only grow.
Europe’s Digital Markets Act offers a cautionary tale. It’s already made common digital tasks more cumbersome. Reaching Google Maps from Google search now takes extra steps. Apple delayed capabilities like Apple Intelligence in Europe because the DMA created security and privacy risks. As a former European Central Bank President observed last year, “innovative companies that want to scale up in Europe are hindered at every stage by inconsistent and restrictive regulations.” Is this the lead that America should follow?
Experts note that the law would erode effective parental safeguards for the mobile ecosystem. Supporters of the bill sometimes counter that Apple and Google already allow apps like TikTok that raise national security concerns. But this argument misses the point. TikTok was not formally identified as a risk until two years after its US launch. Under the App Store Freedom Act, Apple and Google would have been forced to open their platforms to TikTok during that period. That’s not a competitive safeguard. It’s a security blind spot.
All of this comes just as AI is poised to transform the digital economy once again. As a federal judge noted in dismissing the Federal Trade Commission’s recent case against Meta, the tech landscape is more like a fast-moving river than a fixed monument. If Congress tries to dam that river with static, one-size-fits-all rules, it risks stopping the flow of innovation altogether.
Washington should support innovation, not oversee it. Instead of trying to nationalize the design of smartphone ecosystems, lawmakers should preserve what’s working: a competitive, secure, and ever-evolving digital economy that reflects the preferences of consumers, not the dictates of regulators.
The post What’s at Stake with the App Store Freedom Act appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.
