Hmm, but if your app was decentralized, they could still remove it from the app stores? Which would effectively prevent 95% of people from using it, probably.

No, decentralized distribution is achieved for example when you have widgets hosted on many sites, which all have https so you're not sure what they're hosting for private visitors unless you create an account.

It's hard to ban all those sites. Telegram actually has such widgets, but they prefer to rely on everyone downloading their main app. Moxie also complains that decentralized stuff is slow to change.