I do not relish the idea of having to download Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp directly from a 3rd party store. For me Apple standing between sketchy devs like Zuck-co and my phone is a feature not a bug.
On the other hand, if consumers want Apple involved, they wouldn't leave the app store, they wouldn't download the app, and the app will fail when there's no users.
Why do you think you will be unable to download FB, IG & WA from the App Store?
Now imagine those companies paying a percentage off the top for app store in-app purchases when there is an alternative that doesn’t involve that percentage.
Facebook and Amazon have both tried (and failed) to make their own phones. That’s how much they want to control the entire UX. Of course they would funnel people to their own app stores.
Hell, app stores themselves are places to sell ads and other apps, Apple has proven that.
So why wouldn’t a company with the developer resources and monetization potential of Meta or Amazon create their own app store?
Sure, Meta could demand that people install their super-extra-spyware version of Instagram from the META STORE instead of Google Play. But, what they'd likely find out is the same thing Epic found out when it tried to found its own store: most users just don't care enough to install stuff from third-party stores, and generally won't bother.
Maybe, maybe not. Android didn't attempt to destroy their business though, whereas Apple did (and then turned around and introduced their own, non ATT compliant ad system).
(Actually, they're one of the few people that could make a store like that work, dunno if they'd want the distraction but it might be worthwhile for the ads business).
Because that is an incredibly excessive alternative. Instead of just duplicating their app to a third-party app store run by someone else, you're assuming that Meta will go to the effort to create an entire ecosystem that they then have to manage. They would have to ensure that each app on the store is on the up-and-up and hire an immense amount of staffing for that sort of thing - moderation, development, backend support, customer support, yadda yadda. Not only do they already struggle to control the narrative around content moderation on their platforms, but now they've gotta work on preventing malware from being installed on folks phones, too?
It's way too extra, when the much more affordable option is to drop a Meta-preferred alternative onto a third-party app store that already exists. Yet they haven't even bothered doing that with something like f-droid, so I'm expected to believe that they're just going to jump to the more cumbersome option of opening their own store? When the average end user will just use the default store that comes installed on their phone?
I don't buy it. And I say this as someone who is very much in the "Fuck Zuck"/"Meta is trash" camp.
> The threat to competition that is claimed to be posed by AT&T in this industry is that, through the use of cross-subsidization and customer discrimination, it will use its power in the interexchange market to disadvantage competing electronic publishers. While the possibility of cross-subsidization is as remote here as it is with respect to other subjects considered herein, there is a real danger that AT&T will use its control of the interexchange network to undermine competing publishing ventures.
Sounds familiar, I wonder how things ended for Ma Bell?
For a while, they were broken up into the baby bells. Then, one baby bell started buying up all of the other baby bells and renamed itself ATT. Clearly, that's a totally different company than AT&T. So, ultimately, nothing.
The new comglomerate of "baby bells" isn't even the biggest Telco provider in the USA, let alone the biggest company in the USA... let alone the biggest in the world.
So don't. It's your choice. The benefit is that those who don't mind, will also be able to exercise their choice.
Someone who loves Zuck products and finds them indispensable, but still underhanded and despicable in terms of user abuse (surveillance, manipulative feeds, no socially healthy ad-free no-tracking neutral-feed for-pay option …), has reason to dislike Mr. Meta.
Unfortunately, reality is rarely as a la carte as we all might wish.
They still do since, you know, they make the OS on which those apps would run.