I was joking with my wife about a silly app idea that would be for her and her alone — an inside joke — and I was frustrated all over again about how difficult it is to get an app onto an iPhone. The App Store has many good things going for it. (I’m not just saying that: I really think that as a default, it is a better model for many less-technically-minded folks.) But the single biggest thing I have against it is that it is the only way to get software onto your iPhone without jumping through weird hoops: distributing software to friends and family via TestFlight is a hack, and a bad one, and it shouldn’t be necessary in the first place.

We spend inordinate amounts of money on these extraordinarily powerful little computers. We ought to be able to put whatever software on them we want. They ought to be ours. They are ours.

Lots of us out here are enthusiastic about Robin Sloan’s home-cooked meal – style apps. It would be a lot easier to be enthusiastic about them in practice and not just in principle if distributing them to our friends and family were easier.

My friends know I’m a native apps snob. (I tell them!) But the reality is that for distribution, the web wins by a mile. It’s not quite true that no one can stop you from publishing something on the web. Doing something bad enough (or live in a place censorious enough) and your internet provider and hosting options may disappear — and that is in some cases a very good thing. But the difference between the open web and the App Store (or Play Store) is not miles. It’s light years.

If there are any Congresspeople out there reading this — or anyone adjacent to them — , the single most valuable bill you could pass when it comes to breaking the monopsonistic grips Apple and Google have is also a very simple one: a right to install. When people buy hardware, they should have the right to put on it whatever software they want. Hardware vendors should be able to make things secure, but they shouldn’t be able to block you from putting your own apps or even your own operating system on a device. It’s yours, not theirs. And sure, let the vendors be explicit in their Terms of Service that if you put a new OS on the device, that voids the warranty. But don’t let them stop people from installing their own software.