A whole lot of people taking this hypothetical seriously but nobody bothering to ask the real question...
Why do you think you will be unable to download FB, IG & WA from the App Store?
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.