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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

Just curious.

On the other thread, people complain that Google didn't take down a scam app fast enough.

People obviously complain about the 30% commission fee for digital goods.

So if people don't want to pay the commission, and they want Google to police all the apps, isn't that just a giant cost for Google without a way of making it sustainable?

Unless people are ok with drastically higher initial phone hardware costs to make up for the loss revenue on app store commissions? For example, let's say the average phone now costs $1,000 and Google can collect 30% commission. Let's say countries ban the commission. Google has to make money somehow. They make the phone cost $2,000 now and also they no longer make Android open source to restrict workarounds. Would people prefer that more?

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Why? Is MS expected to do this for Windows or Apple for macOS?

Obviously they can still charge the 30% for their own app stores and use that money for moderation. Why would anyone expect them to be responsible for 3rd party stores?

> also they no longer make Android open source

I don’t think that’s feasible at this point. Also $1000 per phone is not even remotely close to what they’d be losing (at least by a magnitude if not several..)

In any case Android is mainly there to funnel users into search and their other ad-funded services. Basically a cost saving measure to reduce the amount of money they need to pay Apple for keeping Google as the default search engine on iOS.

Hmm. There is a point here.

The reason grocery stores and meat packing plants are inspected, is that competition on price, on profit is a thing. So eventually in a competitive market, someone tries to cut costs by reducing safery checks.

Look at Boeing. Cutting safety in the name of profit.

So if there is a lot of competition for app stores, cost cutting could come out of reduced fees, "safety inspections" could be impacted.

Which means we'll need new laws and regulations for store owners, to make sure they are performing due diligence.

At least, as a parallel construct.

Boieing didn’t really operate in a competitive market, though. It’s a duopoly with a very heavily constrained supply. I doubt it was a conscious decision to prioritize profits over safety (obviously it was irrational to begin with because they just ended up with significantly lower profits than they would have otherwise) just a general culture that values and rewards gross incompetence

They can't have their cake and eat it too. When you entrench yourself in a monopoly, there are duties that come with it

There could've been other app stores. There could've been a choice at startup like there is for browsers. There could've been 4 or 5 app stores installed by default whether you're on a Pixel or on a Samsung device.

It is nobody's fault but Google's that they became a gatekeeper with their app store. Ie: How hard open OSes have to fight to de-googlify a phone. How they push to have it installed by default, which forces me to put my apps on the Play store as 99% of users would go there to look for my apps.

Then there are scare screens to fend off the installation of competing app stores. Then once you've actually managed to install a competing app-store like F-Droid, it has to beg you to go into the settings and check some boxes or it won't be able to perform installations properly.

>They can't have their cake and eat it too. When you entrench yourself in a monopoly, there are duties that come with it

I mean, it seems like people want their cake and eat it too. Not Google.

People want no commission, and for Google to spend resources policing the app store.

Since Google open sources Android, Google doesn't make money from the OS itself. They only make money through pre-installed Google apps and the app store.

People would accept all of that as a "fact of life" if a healthy market existed and we noticed this was the best we could do.

People are not fine with an arbitrary number of 30% and no serious competition to go to to find a better service.

If Google finds the demands unreasonable they shouldn't have put themselves in a monopoly position that'd allow them to become gatekeepers

> Google has to make money somehow

Stop. Just stop. Google "somehow" made $305.63B last year.

At least Apple (and Google as well) have pretty great margins on their mobile offerings.

I expect those to go down. It isn't a law of nature that tech platforms are insanely profitable. Plenty of products are "just" moderately profitable and survive just fine.

If the market (with fair and active competition on the software side) is able to bear "average" phone costs of 1000€ so be it.

The complaint is "if we have to put up with your crap at there should at least be a reason beyond 'just because.'"

The argument you get from Google is that downloading APKs is dangerous so everyone should use the store. When they don't police the store anyway then it's obvious they're just abusing everyone.

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