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Comment by close04 | Hacker News Reader

> on the Mac or on Windows

Let's look at something closer to this situation rather than general purpose computers. Mobiles work with different paradigms all around, especially when compared to Windows (or Linux).

There are free alternatives to Google's Play Store and yet developers still choose to pay Google's cut to have access to it. This tells me whatever benefits the "official" app store provides on each platform outweigh the disadvantages (costs) even when free alternatives are available.

> The AppStore still works on mobile because they force it.

Is there any solid reason to believe the AppStore only works because they force it, while seeing the Play Store work just fine even with free alternatives around? And users even go out of their way to get access to it.

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> There are free alternatives to Google's Play Store and yet developers still choose to pay Google's cut to have access to it. This tells me whatever benefits the "official" app store provides on each platform outweigh the disadvantages (costs) even when free alternatives are available.

That's only because it's pretty hard for the casual user to install third-party apps on Android and even with those artificial barriers, some popular apps are available outside of it, I could mention Fortnite.

It's not that hard to install an app from outside of the Play Store. It's just that people are perfectly comfortable using the most easily accessible option. In the HN bubble it's easy to overestimate how much people care about using some other app store. Developers do because it impacts the bottom line but for users to care it would have to be a pretty massive cost saving or some other obvious drawback of the official store to care about alternatives.

How often did you wonder where your car parts come from? How easy is it to mod your ECU? If there are "open source" parts for your fridge? Etc. - insert any topic that's mostly transparent only for the people who actually care about it and dive deeper into the technicalities. Chances are you care less about that but a car tinkerer feels the same way you do about your app store and wonders why you aren't protesting more.

Why do you not see mobile the same as general purpose computer? What's the difference besides form factor?

Because that's how the industry built the mobile devices regardless of the app store model. The phone is a "disposable" black box and the use cases of most users support this: almost nobody cares about accessing the file system directly for example. There's no support for anything "legacy", the form factor makes difference because it keeps most people away from tinkering with the system, all (most?) of the HW components are custom and the SW that comes with them is just as obscure. Everything relies on the cloud to the point where cutting a smartphone's internet connection pretty much takes away all the smarts. And most users don't have a problem with this, they probably never even stopped to ponder these issues.

For better or worse your PC is a vastly different beast. I'm not saying it should be like this, I'm saying it is.

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