In the context of an open internet where anyone can (and should) publish anything, curation becomes critically important. Filters with criteria for surfacing signal and minimizing noise must exist for a sustainable user experience.

While this can be done at a personal level, the flow of information can easily exceed our capacity and energy to filter. That is when we naturally delegate.

Delegation is never a on/off switch: a continuum exists whereby we trade a little less agency for some convenience, all the way up to no sovereignty for complete convenience.

It is my philosophical stance that we must retain agency over the degree of this tradeoff. It is called personal responsibility, which sadly has been eroded in large parts of the population.

Apple through its App Store (and Google with its Store and newer shenanigans), even assuming good faith, want to establish by means of power that tradeoff for all of us. Regardless of our preferences, age, ethnicity, there is one fixed tradeoff at the extreme: mobile app curation for all* users worldwide is decided by a handful of people in California, incredibly arbitrary and vulnerable to corporate and political pressure.

This is antithetical to the way we naturally delegate, which is bottom-up because of how trust scales, and it's insulting to our right to freedom and ownership, and to our duty of personal responsibility as grown up individuals of a civilization.

Zapstore exists to make this right.