Whoops, thanks, guess I was out of date! Still, Fortnite was sideload-only for a while, and that's a major game.
Yeah I think we can draw a bit of a line from they were a major game not on the Play Store and now they're a major game on the Play Store - my guess is barely anyone sideloaded it.
Well, or that because the game was being sideloaded a lot, Google offered Epic a special deal.
This is not the case. It’s a full capitulation on Epic’s part.
There are alternative software repositories, such as F-Droid.
I think they've faced antitrust things around the dominance of the app store, however do they actually do the same thing as apple here? I can find a story online of tinder switching to asking users to enter their credit card details in the app.
A large part of the world (China) runs their own app stores for Android.
You can download alternative app stores. For example, here is the Yandex app store: https://store.yandex.com/
It's easier to share android apps. I dont need any extra tools to run non-playstore apps on an android.