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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Why is there no meaningful competition in app stores for android where sideloading is possible?

Your question could have been written 15 years ago about Internet Explorer vs Netscape Navigator.

It's mostly as a result of pre-bundling and commercial agreements. We've seen the gradual move away from AOSP to a situation where 'Google Play Services' becomes a closed-source dependency for almost every major Google App, together with their iron grip on device manufacturers to strong-arm its installation in exchange for access to their ecosystem.

At that point, Play Store is the default and most users wouldn't need/want/think about moving away from it.

But also.... ....just in case those naughty users did think about being unfaithful. There is a lot of ethically gray UX design that makes it harder for a third party App Store to gain as deep an integration into the OS, by raising the barrier.

For example, overly alarmist alerts relating to security / unknown sources. Your average techie might know what they're doing, but they're sufficiently scary for your mum to probably abandon her attempts to install that third party App Store and just use the default.

Because if your app is on the Play store, it installs and updates easily and neatly.

If you install a third-party store, every installation is met with scary warnings about installing from unknown sources and how unprotected you are.

It's hard to make a store work if your customers are bombarded with warnings about how dangerous you are.

That's not true, you only have to give it (and not even all unknown sources, just allow e.g. Aurora Store) permission once.

There are popovers that show up every time you install an app from not the play store if you give it permission. And you can't autoupdate apps from not the play store.

Although this is changing as of Android 12.

But you better believe that change is significantly because of fear of antitrust regulation than Google doing the right thing.

Why would I, as an end-user, install another app store? I can't imagine a compelling reason. Install apps banned by Google? Never heard of any that I want. Install apps that have better pricing because of lower fees? Haven't heard of any, I use mainly very popular apps like Uber and Yelp. Installing an app store sounds like a "big" thing to do to my phone, what's the super compelling reason I should do it?

NewPipe and Simpletask are not available on the Play store but are on F-Droid.

I’ve never heard of those and don’t know why I’d want them. Which gets to one of the main purposes of the official store, which is getting your app in front of people who haven’t heard of it.

> I’ve never heard of those and don’t know why I’d want them.

Google generates revenue from YouTube by artificially hindering the YouTube app by preventing it from playing videos in the background or with the screen off unless the user pays for a monthly subscription.

NewPipe removes that artificial barrier.

The Google search term "how do I play YouTube videos in the background" yields over 2 billion results[1]. There is an incredible amount of demand for this feature alone.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+i+play+youtube+in+the...

Your employer might require it.

Seriously, I'd go so far as to suggest that this push for side loading is a bit of a red herring. Even if multiple stores existed on iOS and Android, and even if they worked just as well as the official stores, I don't see why consumers would be bothered installing them (for the reasons you mentioned). Companies will still need to list on the App Store or Play Store and adhere to the platform vendors rules if they want any chance of success.

The only way I'd see alt stores being successful is if first-party stores were banned. This is pretty much what has happened with Android in China, but the UX is a mess. Users have to install a half-dozen stores, with each store taking up a pretty significant chunk of system storage and resources and with each store managing updates independently (which often creates weird conflicts when the different stores interact with each other). And for all that trouble, it's not even as if these stores charge developers any less than the App Store and Play Store do. Why would I as a consumer voluntarily sign up for this?

The value in the Play Store and App Store is that it is a single, centralized repository where users know they can find and manage all of their software. This significantly reduces the cognitive load associated with software installation.

Today? There is little reason, because there's not much out there.

But if it were actually possible to build a competing store, you would see companies offering features, innovations, and value that you will never see from Google or on Google Play. That's the free market.

I know I would install a store that was actually curated (not like what Apple and Google claim) with apps that have no malware, maybe no ads, etc. There are a lot of potential business opportunities in this space that cannot possible succeed today with the current anti-competitive practices of Apple and Google.

I'm not really answering your question here, but sideloading allow alternatives with different goals than google play.

For example F-Droid is actually very big particularly with users trying to get rid of google services on their phones. But it's a marketplace for opensource apps and services, which most commercial apps are not.

F-Droid architecture is terrible (it could take them weeks to build an app, and since they build all apps updates are severely delayed) and their app is a buggy mess. In other words, F-Droid not being widely used is not an indication of people not wanting to use a third party store per se even if it only carries open source apps.

Now we know the benefits that the google playstore provides.

You can host your own fdroid repos and use Aurora Droid as client instead.

e.g. Quasseldroid is distributed that way. The result is an awesome store UI, instantly deployed updates, and independence from the Play Store.

The only disadvantage is that, because it's not preinstalled, no one knows about it.

People want a plug and play solution, not to have to research F-Droid client alternatives and then install third party repos which they don't know if they can trust.

Sure, but now you're saying the actual value of the Play Store is that it is preinstalled. Not the technology it provides.

I said if I Google "F-Droid" I should get to a webpage that contains an app that works properly and that comes with good repos preloaded. Similar to how Steam is installed on PCs.

Instead I get a crappy app with very outdated repos. That's not good enough.

Google prevents mobile app distribution competitors from competing with the Play Store on feature parity because user installable 3rd party mobile app stores cannot implement automatic upgrades, background installation of apps, or batch installs of apps like the Play Store can.

If the user tries to install an app on their own, they're shown scary warnings and must adjust arcane settings, but if they use Google's Play Store, no scary warnings are shown and no settings need to be adjusted. They're told they're "protected" by Play Protect, but aren't shown scary warnings about the fact that the Play Store is the main distribution method for malware on Android[1] when they go to install apps with it.

The Play Store isn't alone in being a vector for malware, as Apple's App Store is responsible for nearly half of a billion malware installs of just XcodeGhost alone[2]. This is why the mobile app distribution market needs healthy competition.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/play-store-identified-as-main-...

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7bbmz/the-fortnite-trial-is...

It is hard to make revenue from an app store, because most downloaded apps are free ones, and a large percentage of them use Admob to monetize. A qualified competitor needs to provide significant amount of bandwidth for the free apps.

For paid apps, Google could always cut less than you if they feel threatened.

And Google controls the Android OS development.

BTW, there are tons of Android app markets in China. No monopoly there.

Because most users can't decouple the App Store from the OS.

Because Google forces phone manufacturers to install Google Play store on every device manufactured.

Otherwise, Google threatens manufacturers out of the Android ecosystem, and will not allow them to install Gmail, Google, etc apps.

So, there is no competition at all. Google is a monopoly.

Convenience and higher (perceived) safety of the google app store?

because running an app store costs a lot of money and would only be profitable if you had a lot of customers at which point you have a hard time fighting the advantage google has with play store already available.

An app store is not a product, it is a feature.

If the App Store is a feature, then maybe they should charge more for the product to cover that feature.

The question was why is there no meaningful competition in app stores - not sure how charging more for the product would cause there to be more app stores for that product?

Play store works too well. They've hardly banned anything. They handle payments well (Inc refunds, reminders of upcoming charges etc). Why bother going elsewhere?

Think about how expensive user acquisition is in general. You need to pay a lot for advertising, you need to have a solid product, an operations team to look at analytics and constantly improve the user experience, you need to offer deals that give new customers value, etc. You have to spend a lot of money, especially if you want to compete with Google.

Now on top of that, you have these burdens that make it practically impossible to compete with Google, even if you have the funding, talent, and a better product:

* You need to train every potential customer on how to find and enable the "allow unknown sources" option on their phone (which is different on every phone, and constantly changes place between OS updates)

* Convince them to ignore the many scary warnings from Google about malware and security and all that stuff when they try to do so

* Teach them how to download and install an APK from your website (and maybe how to deal with the Play Protect pop-up that insinuates your app is possibly malware)

And if you manage to do that with enough customers to build a sustainable business (unlikely), you'll still be at a competitive disadvantage on their phone because your store can't install updates automatically, so you need to send users annoying notifications to install updates manually.

You're also at risk of being targeted by Google's competition ~~hit-squad~~ I mean Project Zero, which, if you get in their sights, they will analyze your store around the clock until they find a vulnerability, and then irresponsibly disclose it in order to scare customers away[1]

Plus there's Play Protect, which (at least last time I checked) you can never really get rid of. When you install an app, it will ask you if you want Play Protect to send it to Google for analysis. If you decline, it will just ask you again later.

And if you accept, Google's notoriously unreliable bots could decide that your app is malware, and then block it from being installed on any device. Good luck getting a decision like that resolved.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/fortnites-android-vu...

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