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Comment by tacker2000 | Hacker News Reader

tacker2000

People need to realize that these walled garden lock ins are the worst thing ever in our industry.

To be honest, I would think twice nowadays if I wanted to do invest my precious life in developing an iOS app and have my income derived from that. If the gatekeeper is unhappy, they can kill my livelihood without any recourse.

Same thing is happening in the ecommerce space with Amazon: they can ban your seller account without any reason and you lose all the revenue and your funds get frozen.

Shoot first, ask questions later. Thats whats going on here and threatening good businesses and individuals who have invested time and money into these platforms.

So if you think that these monopoly platforms should not be regulated properly, think about these scenarios. And Im not buying the “security” argument that always gets thrown around.

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> To be honest, I would think twice nowadays if I wanted to do invest my precious life in developing an iOS app and have my income derived from that. If the gatekeeper is unhappy, they can kill my livelihood without any recourse.

Don't worry, Apple has predicted your concerns, and has made sure that PWAs can't implement basic functionality[1] that native apps can. You're practically forced to write native apps for mobile users because of it.

But I am in the same boat. I have several open source macOS apps that the gatekeeper is making difficult to distribute without paying a $100 a year Apple tax. If you don't pay the Apple tax, then macOS treats your app as if it's radioactive, and refuses to run it unless users know how to perform a magic ritual that bypasses Gatekeeper.

There are iOS and Android apps that I'd like to develop, but I'm not going to bother for two reasons. The first is that the App Store and the Play Store have encouraged a race to the bottom for mobile app pricing, and consumers expect apps to either be free or costs a dollar or two. The mobile app store distribution model has broken the paid upgrade model for apps, the same payment model that is alive and well on desktops. The second reason is that Apple or Google are capricious, and my potential mobile app can only exist at their whims. There is also no guarantee that either company won't rip off the apps, either.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26520148

That's right.

Just one more reason to break them up. I'm certain I'll get people who disagree, or say that it won't do any good. But I disagree. These companies are too big, too powerful. Break them up.

Ah yes, the famous walled garden of Android.

What?

Like Apple, Google also mandates that apps distributed via the Play Store must use Google's payment system[1], and give Google a 15% to 30% cut of revenue:

> Developers charging for apps and downloads from Google Play must use Google Play's billing system as the method of payment.

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[2] when they go to install apps with it.

That sounds like a walled garden to me.

[1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

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

I don't think you understand what a walled garden is.

There's a default store, sure.

But there's literally nothing preventing you using a 3rd party store or even installing apks directly on the device.

Not every Android phone can be rooted, and a lot of people don't root even if they can. Without rooting, there's way, way more friction every time you want to install or update an app from outside the Play Store. It's better than iOS, sure, but that's not saying much.

What else would you call the Play Store on which the vast, vast majority of Android users acquire apps? Please don't bring up F-Droid or the Amazon App Store as alternatives, that's just a joke compared to the sheer volume of app installs (and more importantly, purchases) on the Play Store.

Just because alternatives are not as popular as the default store does not make it anywhere close to being a walled garden. I'm not sure you understand what the term means.

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