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Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

For the same reason you can’t build a phone.

You’ll be competing with multi-billion dollar corporations who have exclusive content and nobody will bother with your store.

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> You’ll be competing with multi-billion dollar corporations who have exclusive content and nobody will bother with your store.

What does me building a store have anything to do with its adoption? I build lots of low/no-adoption software for fun or for small/personal use. This line of thinking, that if you can't be a top-level player in a competitive market, you can't build anything is foolish. You shouldn't confuse the building and marketing concepts, especially not to support disallowing the former.

But that's not anti-competitive.

All manner of well-funded corporations would be able to start app stores on mobile, and several (Epic, Valve/Steam, Microsoft) would start app stores the second they were able to.

They'd also be competing for software - as there's a lot of fat that can be trimmed in those 30% margins.

The competition, which would be fierce, is more than enough to solve the issue of price fixing.

Any fat trimmed in the margins (which is less than you think) would not accrue to developers because they’d have to deal with multiple stores and multiple rules sets.

They also wouldn’t have to offer the same terms to every developer. All they would need to do would be to lock in some exclusive popular apps. ‘Competing for developers’ doesn’t mean making things better for all developers. It just means securing enough exclusives that people can’t ignore your store.

On Android there is the F-Droid software repository, and there is no issue of competition with the Play Store. Would things be different on Apple phones?

Android also have a lot of malware issues. I’ve had to help factory reset Android phones quite a few times because friends and family ended up getting spammed with sex notifications and had their search engine hijacked. Windows and OSX suffers from the same problems. The reason these platforms suffer from malware, while iOS does not, is because they allow third-party installations.

From what I've seen, the majority of Android malware either comes from Google's Play Store, or gets included on the phones by certain OEMs. F-droid in particular, due to its open source requirement, hasn't ended up hosting any malware so far.

F-Droid is even more locked down than the App Store, and even if they turned it into the default app store then Android would still be riddled with malware.

As to how the Android users keep acquiring malware, I have no idea whether it’s from the Play Store, or if they download free apk files of paid apps, or if they download it through ads or from emails or whatever. I just know I have to help fix them regularly, and if iOS is forced to open up then iPhones will suffer from the same malware issues that you see with OSX/Windows/Android.

This is incorrect. Google's own statistics (https://source.android.com/security/reports/Google_Android_S...) indicate that devices that use side-loading have an 8x relative higher incidence of malware compared to devices that only install apps from the Google Play Store.

(Note: I believe Google's absolute numbers are significantly underestimated due to the poor performance of Google Play Protect compared to other malware detection tools, but so far they are the only source I have found that publishes relative numbers between the Play Store vs side-loading.)

As some high profile examples:

- HummingBad infected 85 million devices primarily via direct-download on malicious adult websites. (https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-android-malware-has-infec...)

- Agent Smith infected 25 million devices primarily via a third-party app store. (https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20688885/agent-smith-andr...)

Developers can safely ignore the F-Droid store because it represents no significant market share.

This will not be true of the stores that Epic, Facebook, and Google, and Amazon et al would start up on iOS.

F-Droid does not offer any form of payment, anyway. All the apps offered by F-Droid are open source and the majority of them ad-free, and it's honestly a fantastic resource for me. It actually has quite a lot of apps, including games, productivity tools, utilities, and other things. Something like this wouldn't be possible at all on Apple's platform.

> As of June 2017, the Google Play store hit 3 million apps by 968,000 developers, trumping the Apple App Store. In comparison, the Amazon App Store only has around 600,000 apps by 75,000 publishers, as of Spring 2016.

https://www.businessofapps.com/news/amazon-app-store-vs-goog...

Interestingly, there appears to be more revenue made per user on the Amazon store than on Google Play:

https://www.mobilemarketer.com/ex/mobilemarketer/cms/news/re...

I think this confirms my point.

Note that as per Epic’s other lawsuit, the Amazon App Store is working at a severe disadvantage to Google Play.

It refutes your claim that developers will end up having to support alternate app stores or risk losing on market share. Despite the potential for greater revenue on the Amazon Appstore, developers don't seem to be flocking to it.

People seem to be buying into Epic's own claims of self-importance. They may be the ones to have finally advanced grievances against the App Store to the lawsuit, but they do not- nor should they- have the ability to frame the entire discussion. Their standards for openness are debatable.

It doesn’t really refute my claim. For one thing for most developer, Android is an afterthought in terms of profitability because of iOS, and for another, secondary app stores don’t function on an equal footing with the play store, which is why Epic is also suing Google.

Android just isn’t a model for what would happen on iOS. Obvious really, because Android has never had anything like the same success in app sales.

IMHO there would be a large market for local stores that promote local apps. It would usher in an era of local discovery and decentralization. I think it would be a huge win for everyone except companies abusing the monopoly like characteristics of demand aggregation.

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