In recent years, the Danish Government has been vocal about its concerns regarding the influence of large tech companies and social media platforms. In 2023, the government published 13 recommendations for increased democratic control of big tech’s business models. Despite of various initiatives to tame big tech and to fight issues such as online-crime, disinformation and social media’s consequences for children’s mental health, the Danish government is overlooking an obvious chance to take away power from big tech: Public app-stores.
Denmark is one of the most digitalized countries in the world. It has almost become a routine that the Danish digitalization bubble celebrates “winning the world cup” in public sector digitalization (The e-government survey of the United Nations) once a year. In everyday life, Danish citizens interact with the public sector and public services through a number of digital services and apps. Some of the most popular are e-boks for digital mail from public authorities, the health insurance and various other public healthcare apps, public transport, MitID (The Danish e-ID). In addition to that, Danes use a number of popular semi-public apps, for instance by the public broadcaster DR or the state-owned railway DSB.
All these public apps have one thing in common: If you want to use them, you can download them through two sources and these sources only: Apple’s app store and Google Play Store.
In other words: If you want to be a digital citizen in Denmark and interact with public services through apps, the public services force you to use big tech’s platforms. This is arguably a paradox with regard to the government’s efforts to tame big tech, especially since the solution to this paradox is that easy:
Develop an alternative app-store for public and semi-public service apps to make it possible for users to be a digital citizen in Denmark without having to stop by Google and Apple.
There are a few obvious counter arguments to this idea. But in my opinion, many of them can be debunked quite easily. Let me try.
First, there is safety. Both Google and Apple have made serious efforts to ensure that it is safe for users to download apps from their stores and that no malware is distributed on these platforms. It could be time- and resource consuming for the agency responsible for a public app store to ensure the safety of the platform. This could be solved by only offering public and semi-public apps on the platform to start with. Hopefully, whoever develops apps for the public sector would not deliver malicious apps to the state. If we trust government agencies to develop safe apps, this should not be a problem for the public app store. Unknown thirds parties should not be allowed to distribute apps through this channel in the beginning.
Second, there is the argument that it is unnecessary to develop such an app store. Users who do not want to use these apps can still access public services through their websites. This is true, but only partially. Some of the apps offer features that the websites do not offer. This is especially true for semi-public services like the national journeyplanner or DR’s app for podcasts. In addition to that, many of the websites are less-user friendly than the apps. Moreover, it is so common to use digital public services in daily live that you almost have to have a laptop nearby to access these digital services if you do not have an app.
Just recently, my doctor’s secretary was annoyed by the fact that I could not access my doctors message while I was at work, because I do not have the app “Min Læge” (My doctor) on my phone – it is, of course, only available via Appstore and Google Playstore. How did a young tech-savy guy like me dare not to have that app? So annoying for the secretary. That’s where we are at in Denmark, and that is why we need an alternative solution for app stores.
The third counter-argument is privacy. Why should the state be able to know, which apps users download and use? This is a valid argument. However, this is only valid for users that try to opt-out completely from using digital state-services. It does not matter whether you download the app from Google Play Store or some public app-store. As long as you use public apps, “the state will know anyways”. This is not to say that privacy concerns regarding such an app-store are not valid and of course they have to be addressed, should such a store be developed. I am just arguing that they do not disqualify the idea of such an app-store per se.
The fourth argument could be that no-one would use the public app-store, because it is inconvenient for users to have multiple app-stores. This is a tricky one, because it is probably true. I would, however, go as far as to argue that the state should remove its apps from Google Play Store and Apple Store if the state is serious about its aim to tame big tech. Why should the state promote these services, if an alternative is so easily achievable?
Offering apps through different app-stores is not rocked science. Already today, android users can download a variety of apps through app stores such as F-droid or Aptoide. Some of them arguably have their issues (for instance security and privacy), but this is just to prove the point that alternatives are possible. Some companies even make it possible to download Android-versions of their apps directly through their website, such as the messenger-services Threema and Signal. It is unfortunately trickier with Apple, but Google could at least be a start.
There remains the important question of who should develop such an app. For now, the Danish Agency for Digital Government is an obvious option – especially because it already is responsible for borger.dk, the main portal for public sector services online, and the Danish e-ID MitID.
Some Danes might say that we do not need another failed or overly expensive public IT-development project, because Denmark has had so many in the past years. But following that argument, we could just stop all digital development by the state, could we not?
Maybe such a public app-store could also be developed at the EU-level. But I am predicting that this would take too long, and maybe Denmark has something to gain as a first mover here, maybe even something to earn if the Danish app-store can be exported to or used by other countries’ public apps. After all, in these political times, a Danish public app store might be a place that many people can trust. I believe that developing a public Appstore for public and semi-public services is a simple idea that can show the public that the Danish Government is serious about its efforts to limit the influence of big-tech. Compared to many other issues, such an app-store is quite an easy solution. And maybe the idea goes beyond the app-store itself, because such an initiative could show users that are so used to Google, Facebook and other big tech-companies that there are other possibilities out there. We just have to make sure that there actually are these possibilities
This opinion piece is written by Hinnerk Frech. Read more about him at the contributor page
Photo: Mariia Shalabaieva from Unsplash.com
