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Comment by southerndrift | Hacker News Reader

>Do not attempt to register a new developer account. Any new accounts will be closed and your developer registration fee will not be refunded. We recommend that you use an alternative method for distributing your apps in the future.

If this is a serous problem, why is there no other app store? There should be plenty of programmers who need another method to reach their customers.

For starters, Amazon's app store should do [1]. If enough developers reach out to their customers, it could become a viable alternative.

That said, "The Castle" [2] should be a compulsory reading for each Android developer, or app developers in general.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Appstore

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_(novel)

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"Other app stores" do exist, but Google went to great lengths to destroy them. Publishing clients for alternative stores in Google Play/Android Market have been prohibited by Google's ToS for years (don't know if it is still prohibited). The "allow alternative app sources" checkbox (unchecked by default!) has been deterring users from installing from non-Google sources till Android 8. It still exists, but Google have ruled, that third-party marketplace apps are better than malware-riddled piracy websites, so Android 8+ allows to whitelist specific marketplace apps while still keeping the checkbox unchecked. And let's not forget about Google's war to banish alternatives to their services from Android devices, while using their own Google Services packages as leverage.

Google's overall approach to building it's walled garden is not much different from Apple's. They give some fake "choice", because they know, that tech-illiterate consumers won't be able to make use of alternative options.

If you can escape the "garden" just by checking a box, it's not much of a walled garden. The choice is very real, e.g. there's nothing like F-Droid on iOS devices. This makes Android devices a fairly sensible choice overall, although some devices are still more open than others (supporting e.g. alternative, Google-free OS's like LineageOS, and perhaps the future PostmarketOS).

”If this is a serous problem, why is there no other app store?”

It is serious, but only for a few developers, not for most, nor for Google. It has to be wide-spread to make alternative store(s) viable.

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