It doesn't matter. As long as you can spam people with crap like popups and notifications easier than on the web, we will still see all those unnecessary 'apps' that could just be a web page.

Heh, I have been wondering about this for a very long time. The walled garden toll booth is too strict.

For example, the old Uber with the crazy thing they did. What if in the alternate universe they straight up got banned? That’s it. All investments would go to zero.

Like Uber drivers' using their girlfriends' ID verification because they have a criminal record, you can also just cut in some random guy to borrow his ID for another chance. There should be plenty of dudes available willing to sell an ID verification for cheap in poorer countries but there's also plenty in wealthy countries because very few anywhere were ever going to have a Google developer account in the first place.

Some of us started long long ago, Android 1.0 time, when Google seemed like a different company. Their first blogs didn't mention splitting your personal google account from your developer account. I never heard of anyone getting banned. Oh boy, things have changed!

Isn't it simple? You do it because it makes money.

Lots of businesses can fail at any time. People still run them and work for them as long as it makes money, and WHEN it stops working, they stop that and do something else to make money. All business is ephemeral.

People want apps.

Businesses want to make money on the apps people want.

Businesses exchange money for goods and services.

You exchange money for food and shelter.