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Comment by fireattack | Hacker News Reader

>Google has made the process of installing alternative app stores obtuse enough

I do agree an average user would feel the warning intimidating, but I don't think it's obtuse (or do you mean obscure?) at all. If anything, it's pretty explicit.

If you try to install apk from say, your browser (the most likely scenario for Fortnite), the system would ask you to give it the privilege to install "unknown/unsafe app" or whatever it's called. And you only need to change this setting once. Later you can just directly install any APK from this app (browser).

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I think the bigger issue is 3rd party apps installed this way do not get any permissions to auto update (either itself or other apps).

This makes it near impossible to make an app store that competes with any system app store as you do not get 1 click installing or updating. Or for the app to even update itself. So a user who has 10 updates on a different app store would have to click through 10 install prompts just to update.

That is a big issue and I wish we could force Google (and Apple for that matter) to change it. For the longest time, I thought the Fdroid people didn't want this feature, turns out they can't do it on vanilla Android.

Yep. If you have a rooted Android phone, Fdroid does have a separate package you can install for that feature

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged...

> the system would ask you to give it the privilege to install "unknown/unsafe app"

A tech savvy android owner wouldn't think twice about that. Anyone else (the vast majority of customers) would likely not continue, either because they're scared of something they don't understand (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, aka "FUD"), or because they're annoyed and confused by having so many popups which they don't want to read.

Whatever the case, the UI/UX flow of getting your product onto a customer's device is critical. It's why companies pay OEMs so much money to preinstall their software onto their devices.

Optimizing the customer experience is one of the most important ways to beat the competition. It's an investment that provides value directly to the consumer.

But Google is restricting competitors from doing that. If you want to compete with Google, you need to force all your customers through the Google-designed funnel of scary warning and repeated technical popups. This limits competition, and harms consumers.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obtuse

2.b: "difficult to comprehend : not clear or precise in thought or expression".

I think that makes sense.

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