Interestingly, she's avoided viruses on Windows for decades. I think thats because she wouldn't trust random apps from dodgy websites in the way she'd trust Google Play.
My parents are also very cautious with what they install on Windows, and I think that's a pretty good approach. But it's pretty clear that plenty of people aren't so paranoid, and it's not always easy to tell a dodgy site from a legitimate one.
The store will then build the application binaries based on provided instructions, run tests to make sure the application meets store criteria, and publish it if everything looks good. Perhaps there will need to be some manual intervention when necessary but we should be able to automate things more as we see more use cases.
That and the client "store" should be decoupled from the server store and users should be able to add/remove server stores as they see fit.
As the OP is pointing out, the simple alignment of one platform with one app store is also a bit blurred. Neither Google nor Amazon control Windows. You can install the Amazon store on other Android devices. No doubt Samsung (and some other manufacturers) are trying to do their own marketplaces. And it's conceivable that in the future, they're forced to allow more competition (e.g. something like Steam for phones).
Microsoft can achieve the same goal already through Windows Defender. My app was recently flagged as a trojan (false positive) and it would be wiped from users' computers before they could even run it.
>they also have the ability to remove it from devices where it was already installed.
That Microsoft can't do, but I'm not really sure that it's a good thing...
>The app store model probably also delivers security updates to legitimate apps more effectively than every developer managing their own distribution.
Citation needed there.
Linux’s package manages show that quite well. I can update (almost) all my packages with a simple command. On Windows, if Inkscape has a security vulnerability that an update fixes, I'm not informed of this unless I follow the development or use an RSS feed of sorts.
If every app handles its own updates, that also means that either you've got N background auto-updaters running, or the check has to wait until you run the software - and potentially get exploited by a hole patched in the update it's just downloading.