But the danger is that these deals could result in a kind of two-tier system, where there are preferred partners whose offerings get heavily promoted, and small app publishers whose offerings get lost in the rest — if they even make the jump on the platform of their choice at all. And consumers are left in the dark about all of this, bound to make their content choices based on the apps that their device maker agreed to carry or promote.
This article on the consumer electronics (the middlemen) that host online video services is a fitting example of what Felix Stalder argues in "Between Democracy and Spectacle": "There is a structural imbalance between the service providers on the one side, who have strong incentives to carefully craft the infrastructures to serve their goals, and the users on the other side, who will barely notice what is going on, given the opacity of the back-end."