Just waiting for Adobe Store, Amazon Store, Microsoft Store, Epic Games Store, etc. to be installed on every phones soon.
Current status isn't normal, but no one would complain about it if transaction fees weren't abusive.
Current status isn't normal, but no one would complain about it if transaction fees weren't abusive.
Why would it happen with iOS when it has not happened in the 15 years or so since Android exists?
There's basically just one relevant alternative app store which is F-Droid, and it's just all around much better than Google's Play Store, although of course it doesn't have any proprietary, closed-source apps.
This is an oft-repeated misconception.
Even if transaction fees were 0%, we'd be way better off with alternative stores.
You're just so used to how shitty things are that you can't conceive of a better alternative.
Consider that there are plenty of completely free games on Steam that are popular and help those creators find thriving communities. How? They have good discovery.
App Store and Google Play sucks in every way. Discovery is awful. Their approach is awful. Why even show download counts and top lists? Stupid, stupid stupid. But you have no choice as a consumer or developer. So the top developers will not complain. What's the point?
And anyway, you're complaining about a world where alternatives are viable. Why are alternatives being viable a bad thing. If EGS is paying up front for games and giving them away for free as cross-promo for Fortnite, better that than ad supported garbage.
What exactly is the bad thing here, for consumers? The negative aesthetic experience of having more icons? Everyone has to oppose this crushed-in-head line of thinking. One meaingless detail that impacts an extremely low brow part of the aesthetic experience - the fucking home screen icons - should not preclude the gain in meaning from 10k-100k more developers who could flourish in the mobile ecosystem if it were to have working discovery. It has the same energy as requiring Helldivers users to create PSN accounts - offensive only in a strictly aesthetic sense even though successful competition and cross promo benefits everyone. The users' fixation on meaningless aesthetics is wrong.
I mean Apple could make discovery pluggable too, all of it could be pluggable and have fewer "icons," this isn't even a real obstacle. There are many, many ideas in this space, and no permissions to do any of it.
As it is, the App Store and Google Play are glorified install wizards. Open, install TikTok, Google Maps, whatever. Never visit again. That is 98% of people. That's horrible and its Apple's fault. TikTok already does not pay any fees. This is just to show that you are not right in general, even if you are right about the one company you've heard of that went and took these people to court in this country for an outcome that you should be in favor of.
Using stock iOS and Android today, it feels like both sides have lost the script. The entire pipeline of "consumption" dominates both platforms, and demands you pay money or accept a competitor's inferior product. Google didn't even let F-Droid auto-update apps until recently, it's a racket on either side. We need to bring the hammer down and enable people to stop supporting shit businesses. The current loop of consumption is going to kill everything we love about computing with a long and painful extortion process.
1) Hijacking an already-approved application
2) Creating a forked/new fraudulent application and submitting it to the store
Option 1 requires you to fool the repository owner, first of all. That would mean submitting a pull-request with your malicious code, having that malicious code reviewed by the app author, and then getting it into a major release. In most apps with a significant userbase that's nigh-unimaginable; especially if there are testers or multiple contributors testing and debugging on recent builds.
Option 2 requires you to fool the F-Droid admins. This means one of two things. Either creating a forked application with plausible yet distinct features that make it necessary to be forked from the main project. Alternatively, you get ChatGPT (or just copy boilerplate ffs) and make a calculator app or whatever, commit it all to Github and send it in for review. Both of these routes are horribly suspicious - a reviewer is going to want to see if you have multiple contributors, a long history on Github, linked social media accounts or websites, other repositories, binary blobs, that sort of stuff. Maybe they aren't the most cautious, but suffice to say anyone making an attack like this is going to be covered in red flags.
So; it's a feasible attack. But it requires so much social manipulation for so little feasible gain (especially when F-Droid wasn't even auto-updating for most people) that it's not worth the effort. If you do manage such a daring attack, your reward is maybe 300-odd sideloading users that mistakenly clicked your install button instead of the other guy's.
That feels like the natural direction App Store competition would take us. But, on the other hand, it doesn’t seem to have happened on Android, so maybe I’m being overly pessimistic.
I'm not sure I see the problem here. If some apps are only available through shitty ad-packed vendor-controlled stores, then hopefully that'll push people to simply avoid them. I mean, if I want to video-chat with someone and to use Skype/Teams I have to download the Microsoft store app and suffer with all that, or I just could use Facebook Messenger on the regular Google Play store (assuming they don't force their own store like MS) and it's easy, I'm going to tell my friend, "let's use FB Messenger instead; these MS apps are a pain in the ass." And if someone insists on using some shitty MS app that I can only get through the shitty ad-laden MS Store, I might re-evaluate how much I really want to chat with them. Smarter app vendors are going to try to avoid putting their users through that experience.
(Also, this is just an example; for all I know, Meta/FB in this possible future would be the stupid one pushing an ad-laden store while MS might be the smarter one making it easier for users to install their apps.)
For everything else I'd expect publisher's to just put their app in my favorite place, or risk me choosing something else.
For example im not going to install a new store just to get a note-taking app, unless that app was in some definitive way superior to all the others. (Which seems unlikely for a note taking app.)
A lot of dumber app vendors will just drain the suckers dry and rebrand and if Microsoft pulled their apps from the App Store some unfortunate souls would click the first Google hit and get sucked into the scam.
> And if someone insists on using some shitty MS app that I can only get through the shitty ad-laden MS Store, I might re-evaluate how much I really want to chat with them.
It’s comments like this that show a huge lack of understanding of how the majority of people feel. I don’t give a shit if my parents like WhatsApp, but I still want to talk to them. And it’s hard enough to get them to use technology, never mind navigating whatever is to come here.
Are you honestly telling me that you think Meta are going to not use this opportunity to skirt around the limits placed on their apps by the apple App Store? If you believe meta, or byte dance are going to have your best interests at heart, I have a bridge to sell you
Android has curated a market of users who don’t buy apps. I don’t know that we can extrapolate their alt-store outcome to iOS where the buyers are.
Do you think you'd have all those sales every 2 months if Steam were still the only pc games store? :)
Epic has given a lot of free titles away, which is a big difference, but only because they're trying to buy favor and want to be the winner who takes all.
Ok, but Steam is a third party store. The alternative isn't "just Steam", it's "just Microsoft". I'll gladly accept the occasional annoyance of multiple stores to avoid being locked into a monopoly.
But both Apple and Googles stores are slow and packed with ads. Pretty much every search you do for an app even with the exact name gives you some ad supported shovelware as the first one or two results (ads).
So how is this meaningfully any worse? (outside of one more login you might need to setup).
* Epic's Launcher
* EA's Origin
* Ubisoft Connect
* Steam
* GOG
* Xbox Store
* Battle.net
I had a brief Gatcha game phase (before I realized how pay-to-advance it was) and that game had its own damn game-specific "launcher" as well.
Each one of these required creating an account, installs its own "overlay", background windows services, anti-cheat system (more background services!), has its own "social" system, and defaults to running at startup and minimizing (not quitting) when you click the window-close button unless you dig through the options.
Of course, each one of these games also has at least one type of currency unique to the game, which you can only convert in one direction, nor is there any way to move currency in the "store". Often that currency, and anything you bought with it, is locked to the particular platform on which it was purchased.
It's a complete mess, and nearly every single one of them is worse than Steam in terms of UX design and features.
Do we see any competition, resulting in lower prices, better terms of use for customers, or better quality software? Nope. Games are as expensive as ever, have even worse day-of-release bugs, more cheaters, and more microtransactions. Games are exclusive to one particular store either indefinitely or during the period after its release.
But according to Epic, why...if Epic can make its own app store for iOS, consumers will benefit! Bullshit. All that will happen is we'll have to install multiple app store apps on our phones, having each one collect data constantly about us...
On steam and GoG you pay with government issued currency. If the others have a currency system just hard pass on them. If you could cure yourself of Gacha, you can do it.
The gaming industry has enormous amounts of monetization and gameplay innovation, with the huge and vibrant middle that is disappearing from movies, books and music, so I have no idea what you’re talking about. It has never been a better time to find games.
Most of Epics arguments are that the developer will benefit by them taking a smaller cut then Apple/Google/Steam/etc so if they sell the game for the same price the developer gets to keep a couple percentage points more money.
I don't remember any argument they have made that has put the customer as the beneficiary though there probably are some.
The solution is to allow sideloading by the user (which incidentally Google allows you to do).
Gaming is surely popular on phones, but I suggest that AAA games on on a tiny minority of phones overall. (My mom has literally no games on her phone etc.)
For Windows the proportion of games-machines to others is tiny. The number of people with "a dozen game lauchers" would be a microscopic percentage.
Yes, there are home PCs that are dedicated to gaming. Yes they will likely have lots of shortcuts, launchers, auto updates etc. And in some demographics (think male, under 25 etc) there will be proportionally more games installed.
But "average" ? I'm not sure.
~30% of Apple's total value could be attributed to the App Store alone. That's a ~$1T company.
If you think the product is awful - I don't know what to tell you.
Next, are you going to tell me the iPhone is awful and Nvidia's GPUs, too?
Look, just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean it's awful.
The App Store could be better. It doesn't suck.
Lots of things suck and make money, tons of money. OPEC absolutely sucks and makes tons of money, are you going to tell me “OPEC could be better. It doesn’t suck.” Monopolies and cartels don’t just suck, they are horrible, they are the biggest antagonists in our lives, because everyone’s income is someone else’s expense, and we don’t all work for Apple or OPEC.
> The App Store sucks.
It needs an iCloud log in, so you can't install free software on a kiosk without a throw away account. Which is hard to set up.
Why do you first need to 'get' an app and then install it?
How many affirmations do you need?
If apple truly is bringing the market what it wants at a price folks find reasonable surely this competition wouldn't impact anything!
I should be able to install hacking tools, background apps that might kill my battery, sandbox breaking apps that allow adversarial interoperability, porn apps, protest apps that track cops, or apps that do legal things that nonetheless assist me in breaking the law.
Apple allows none of this.