App Store Governance: The Implications and Limitations of Duopolistic Dominance

Much focus of the emerging research front known as platform governance is concerned with content moderation and other ways in which platform companies govern users and activity on their own platforms, as well as with how platforms are themselves governed by states (Gorwa, Inf Commun Soc 22(6): 854–871, 2019). Meanwhile, a related but distinct internet governance literature is concerned with what can be called “stack governance”: important but often unseen governance activities occurring elsewhere on the “tech stack”, beyond or behind platforms, apps and the open web (Donovan, Navigating the tech stack: When, where and how should we moderate content?. Centre for International Governance Innovation, 2019). A notable point of intersection between platform governance and stack governance is represented by app stores. Apple and Google hold an effective duopoly over smartphone software, with 99.2% of devices worldwide running on either Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android software. Both provide a pre-installed app store through which most apps are discovered and downloaded. In addition to the oft-discussed competition concerns that this duopoly poses, Apple and Google’s dominance over app store governance poses broader societal dangers. This includes the risk of harms arising from the spread of dangerous content via apps, such as those claiming to deliver impossible health outcomes, or permitting hate speech, as well as concerns for democracy and accountability that arise from this duopolistic dominance. In order to illuminate these risks, we explore four emblematic episodes of app store governance: the prevalence of inefficacious health apps on Apple’s App Store; the decision to remove far-right platform Parler from app stores following the Capitol Riots in January 2021; Apple and Google’s initial rejection of a UK Covid-19 contact tracing app in 2020; and both companies’ removal of the Russian opposition “Smart Voting” app in 2021. Taken together, the cases we cover surface several considerations that we argue ought to shape legal, ethical, and technical approaches to app store governance—encompassing both how Apple and Google govern their app stores, and how the two companies themselves are and ought to be governed by states.