On 2026-08-05, Theo published "Apple Changed..." — an hour of the most sustained policy criticism in this corpus. The curator's reading of it, with the receipts:
His starting point is distribution control. "There is no path from my app to your phone that isn't App Store or Test Flight." (https://youtu.be/zqOrriq20Tc?t=1393) Both paths require Apple's approval, and that approval gate is where every other complaint begins.
The sharpest economic claim concerns what he calls the entry tax. During the Epic v. Apple trial, he notes, it was revealed that "Apple makes more money on games than Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, and Activision combined" (https://youtu.be/zqOrriq20Tc?t=800) — because the 30% fee applies to all money spent on mobile games, made by a company that has never made a game.
His deeper argument is about the software that never gets built: "We will never have a GoFundMe app" (https://youtu.be/zqOrriq20Tc?t=1648), because a 30% cut of every transaction destroys whole categories of possible applications before they start. This is where his critique turns from pricing to imagination — "Imagine a world like the one Steve Jobs promised" (https://youtu.be/zqOrriq20Tc?t=3148), he asks, invoking the platform's own founding rhetoric against its present behavior.
And beneath the structural argument runs practical exasperation with review itself, down to being unable to ship an update because "the reviewer typoed the email address" (https://youtu.be/zqOrriq20Tc?t=1758).
The through-line the curator finds across the corpus: Theo is not anti-Apple — he narrates the iPhone's underdog years with real admiration — but he argues the incentives flipped once market power arrived, and the platform's rules now protect the toll booth rather than the builders. Ask the reader chat to trace how this connects to his takes on open source, Codeberg, and the AI model wars.
Theo on Apple: a curated reading
Chapter 2 of 2 · about 1 min
On 2026-08-05, Theo published "Apple Changed..." — an hour of the most sustained policy criticism in this corpus. The curator's reading of it, with the receipts:
His starting point is distribution control. "There is no path from my app to your phone that isn't App Store or Test Flight." (https://youtu.be/zqOrriq20Tc?t=1393) Both paths require Apple's approval, and that approval gate is where every other complaint begins.
The sharpest economic claim concerns what he calls the entry tax. During the Epic v. Apple trial, he notes, it was revealed that "Apple makes more money on games than Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, and Activision combined" (https://youtu.be/zqOrriq20Tc?t=800) — because the 30% fee applies to all money spent on mobile games, made by a company that has never made a game.
His deeper argument is about the software that never gets built: "We will never have a GoFundMe app" (https://youtu.be/zqOrriq20Tc?t=1648), because a 30% cut of every transaction destroys whole categories of possible applications before they start. This is where his critique turns from pricing to imagination — "Imagine a world like the one Steve Jobs promised" (https://youtu.be/zqOrriq20Tc?t=3148), he asks, invoking the platform's own founding rhetoric against its present behavior.
And beneath the structural argument runs practical exasperation with review itself, down to being unable to ship an update because "the reviewer typoed the email address" (https://youtu.be/zqOrriq20Tc?t=1758).
The through-line the curator finds across the corpus: Theo is not anti-Apple — he narrates the iPhone's underdog years with real admiration — but he argues the incentives flipped once market power arrived, and the platform's rules now protect the toll booth rather than the builders. Ask the reader chat to trace how this connects to his takes on open source, Codeberg, and the AI model wars.