Seeing all Reddit apps shut down, I can't help but wonder — what is it that made everyone play by the rules? What happened to the adversarial interoperability spirit? What forces people to use their own API keys instead of pretending to be one of the official apps?
I can understand the iOS apps, the App Store hegemony does kinda force this and there were cases of Apple removing apps that interact with an online service without that service's permission. But web, desktop and Android apps have no one to force them to comply with these kinds of rules, yet these are also shutting down.
It wasn't always like this. 15 years ago, when ICQ was huge, everything with a screen, keyboard, a network interface, and a way to run arbitrary code had an unofficial ICQ client for it. Most people haven't ever seen the official clients. That's just one example. What happened?
I can understand the iOS apps, the App Store hegemony does kinda force this and there were cases of Apple removing apps that interact with an online service without that service's permission. But web, desktop and Android apps have no one to force them to comply with these kinds of rules, yet these are also shutting down.
It wasn't always like this. 15 years ago, when ICQ was huge, everything with a screen, keyboard, a network interface, and a way to run arbitrary code had an unofficial ICQ client for it. Most people haven't ever seen the official clients. That's just one example. What happened?