> As the app stores of old fade away in importance their efforts in consumer hardware and developer communities are being further pushed into prominence. I.e. eventually they won't need Google's play store and can more ambitiously take on the market.

This might happen, but seems like wishful thinking. The web really damaged Windows, but the mobile web still has a looooong way to go to unseat mobile apps.

No matter how much noise the big guys make about voice as the next platform, voice is not going to replace most apps any time soon since it is just too low bandwidth as an output channel.