Honestly, I've yet to find an argument for the existence of an app store that holds water. Let people install what they want. Provide reasonable paths to update and upgrade and cut out the middle layer.
The layer of control that Google and Apple exert over people is anti-competitive. But the answer isn't competing app stores. I don't need someone to tell me what I can or can't install on the operating system on my device.
if your problem is the fact that apple restricts people's ability to run software that they haven't explicitly allowed, then I agree, that is a problem. that isn't a problem on google as you can install any apk you want.
That's not to say Apt/Portage are by any means perfect; the nature of how they are configured is definitely not going to be friendly to your typical Windows user. But I think it is possible to wrap that in a UI that adequately expresses "okay, you're adding the ability to install software from this vendor, and [the package manager] will help keep it patched & up-to-date."
I think we also need to combine that with better security models, so that desktop software isn't necessarily granted access to everything by default.
But UI design trends have spent the last decade "simplifying" UIs down so much that they fail to solve the problem at hand.
I'm not only concerned about that, though. The standard 30% cut of revenue flowing through the app if it was downloaded from the app store is also an issue.
In general, App Stores create a 'marketplace' where one doesn't need to exist. That it's the default method of getting software isn't really a benefit because it makes self-distribution harder (or impossible - which is really the anticompetitive issue here).
This isn't true. Other app stores cannot compete with the Play Store on feature parity due to limitations Google put in Android. For example, F-Droid cannot implement background installation of apps, batch installations, or automatic upgrading without first having root.
I think that attitude was fine pre-internet, but these days we are all sharing a network and there's an analogy that can be drawn with public health policies. App stores are one small part of the strategy to help reduce the number of machines that end up as part of a bot net or other similar uses.
Why is that? Why does fear always win? Your argument is based on fear. Why do we favor fear over rationality?
You would choose a dictatorship over a democracy if it meant that you felt safe. This where that line of thinking leads.
You'd rather be safe than free.
Do you look at drunk driving laws as an irrational concession to fear?
The slope isn't nearly as slippery as you seem to think it is.
We got by just fine in the 80s and 90s without App stores. So much innovation came out of that world which established the dominant players who are in control now.
And you don't even get security with App stores. As we already know with all the malware found in Google Play apps.
App stores are simply keeping the big guys big and small guys small with few exceptions here and there.
It's just another walled garden that keeps the little guy out and keeps players like Google and Apple entrenched.
This is exactly the reason app stores should be banished! I want explicit control over my software and I don't want it to update without my explicit consent. There's a trend recently in desktop software to remove features / settings in favor of a simplified mobile-first design, and too often a version from 5 years ago is better than today's.
I want to keep my software forever. Due to hardware improvements, my copy of Photoshop CS4 works even better now than it did 12 years ago when I bought it. You'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands if you want me to switch over to an Adobe CC subscription.
We should tell all the people who have been using Windows for two decades about this.
> whereas linux maintains all of your software for you, keeps it frequently up to date, manages dependencies and does at least SOME level of vetting.
First of all, what vetting? Anyone can become a package maintainer. They then do a package update, but nobody is verifying that they did it correctly. Anyone can sneak a backdoor into a new release of a package. And any hacker can backdoor the source code before it gets packaged. This has happened many times.
Also, the distro often does not keep it up to date. Debian has probably been the worst offender here. Its software is often so ridiculously out of date that you have to use some crappy bleeding-edge release to get a recent version of some software. Or users end up piping an http get into a bash shell as root, which is a super idea.
Finally: dep management? Really? The one thing everyone on Linux bitches about and is always creating some new hokey package manager to solve?
> there definitely are problems with current implementations of app stores in phones, but the idea in general has been a huge boon for security and maintainability.
"This week Google removed 17 Android applications from the official Play Store. According to Viral Gandhi, a security researcher from Zscaler, all 17 applications were infected with Joker (aka Bread). Malware on the Play Store is a common phenomenon and it is a collective duty of both Google and users to deal with them." https://www.gizchina.com/2020/11/02/malware-found-in-the-goo...
Google Play Store: The main source of malware (https://www.androidguys.com/promoted-news/google-play-store-...)
Dangerous Android Malware Returns To Beat Google Play Store Protection (https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/07/09/ldangerou...)
Two-thirds of Android malware comes through Google Play (https://www.tomsguide.com/news/android-malware-google-play)
> if you think that android would be better off without google play you are insane. people would be running insecure nonsense that would be doing stuff like stealing their bank information and all sorts of stuff.
Good thing that never happens on Android, as long as people have the Google Play Store.
Newly Found Malware can steal bank details on Android phones (https://www.hackread.com/malware-can-steal-bank-details-andr...) - "Flash player does not come from the protected Google Play Store but rather from bogus websites and messages which trick the users into installing them in their devices. Websites that the malware usually exists on include adobeplayerdownload.com, adobeflashplaayer.com, and flashplayeerupdate.com."
And you're right, it's worse than that. They're not even getting the security they've trade their freedom for.
You'd think stealing 30% of the profits and booting apps off the store for no good reason would be enough.