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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

> However, I absolutely love that all the developers including the likes of Meta or Uber have to bow down to Apple's rules, which are mostly beneficial to me. I don't want to download apps from alternative app stores. I want them to be available in App Store and to be submitting to all of the curation rules.

On Android, you have to abide by Google's rules if you want to be in the Play Store; Amazon's if you want to be in theirs; F-Droid's to be there.

Consumers have choice over whose rules they care about. In a hypothetical iOS with app store competition, what you write would presumably still be true for the Apple App Store, there just might be an 'F-iOS' or whatever that insists the app is open source too, for example.

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I believe companies like Meta could afford to leave the Apple App Store and distribute apps through their own app store only.

Perhaps you might say that would be fair, but it is a world that suits me less than the current one.

So why is that not happening for android?

You don't have to come up with hypothetical scenarios if you already have a real life example to look at.

This actually happens in China and every phone manufactures has their own app store. It's a shitshow

having multiple stores in itself is fine, but it's even worse worse. if you want to release your app on multiple app stores, you have to release on all of them at the same time. if you skip one they will not allow you to launch there later because you dared to treat them as second choice. imagine apple banning you because you dared to release on android first.

Because there's no point as they need their apps to be cross platform and so Apple is setting a baseline for what behaviour is allowed.

But once Meta, Epic etc can run their own stores on both iOS and Android they will absolutely move their apps to them. Epic has already said how important this is to be able to implement their metaverse strategy.

Epic already did this at the height of fortnite's popularity, by using a "fortnight installer" app that you had to get from outside the play store. Can't remember why they backtracked, or why they didn't offer store/sideload versions at the same time.

Google even took steps to prevent people from installing malware pretending to be fortnite, and steered them to the official installer. Not out of the goodness of their heart, TBF.

I really, really don't think it'll be as easy you as say. Neither the audience nor the regulators will let them off easy, and these creaking giants aren't exactly great at launching popular new platforms, these days:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978081

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30808926

Isn't Google far less strict on privacy rules (and their enforcement) than Apple?

it is happening for android - there is more malware in the third-party stores, even with the extremely minimal scrutiny google apples to the official store.

anyway, here is a real-world example of the type of spyware that facebook and others will deploy once they have the leverage. again, remember that this already happened and most likely still exists and is something they have ready to deploy again if the opportunity presents.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...

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