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Comment by FreeFull | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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...)

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