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Comment by j4n4 | Hacker News Reader

I could not agree more, but Google has no incentive to make it better. Why would they waste the time when you have practically no choice but to use what is provided?

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The incentive is that Android users might buy more apps. That means more profit for Google.

Apple does have roughly twice the revenue as Google, when it comes to all sales. But Google is a huge driver of ads in free apps. So Google has a pretty meaningful reason for making the store solid.

When you search, you can't sort by rating, by price, etc. This is stuff Amazon was doing in the 90s.

Honestly, it feels like Google has some hidden agenda on how they weight search results...

Allo & Duo are waste of time but Google still has the workforce to develop it so I don't think this is the reason.

Well, it's not that hard—at least compared to iOS—to just go to the developer's website and install an APK (which I often do).

There is some choice, maybe not enough?

Then you lose the update mechanism because that's tied to the play store and not the OS. One of the more subtle ways that google maintains hegemony over android.

To, you know, provide a better customer experience.

That's not an incentive, unfortunately. It's a means to an end. The end is the incentive.

More profits through more apps sales. Come on..

Those are ends (incentives), not means. And better customer service is a means, not an end.

Presumably, Google doesn't care much about customer service in this instance, because they have a monopoly on app distribution, and therefore customer service won't meaningfully increase sales. Presumably.

It seems like they redesign it every 6 months

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