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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to see how this shakes out. Will there be viable third-party app stores? Will we find that the gatekeepers added value in controlling quality? How many viable apps did they keep of the market for anticompetitive reasons? What does a more fair revenue cut look like?

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we are not going to uncharted territory. this has been the standard way to install applications since the beginning of time, it is only in the past 15 years that the general publi has been deemed "too dumb to save themselves"

Ignore that *nix distros have had package management for a long time. Those platforms are too niche to draw conclusions from.

I used to fix computers as a side hustle from ~2000-~2006. There was a lot of shit software on the market, no one knew what was good, and the public really was "too dumb to save themselves." Back then, just look at antivirus software. These days, look at VPN snake oil. What's different now is apps are more sandboxed, but new apps are just a few taps away.

And that's a small cost to pay to make sure market competition still exists in the future and that the corporations in the west are forced to innovate instead of killing economy by stagnation and walled gardens.

A lot of apps in the AppStore and PlayStore are filled with spyware and adware or contain obscenely priced subscriptions and loot boxes that people still fall for. So I’m not for sure if there is a big difference, as the gatekeepers willing allow this junk in.

I'm not sure how you define "viable" but Amazon has their own app store for Android. I recall that some years ago I installed it because they gave away paid apps every so often. Looks like its still a thing: https://www.amazon.com/gp/mas/get/amazonapp

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