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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

You would still be able to adb installs them. They wouldn't die.

Developers of these apps would have little motivation if the maximum audience size was cut down to the very few who would use adb. The ecosystem would die.

Or someone comes up with an easy adb wrapper and now it becomes the go-to way to install apps.

Shizuku[0][1] already exists, it would certainly suck but it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Of course I would be much happier if I didn't need to use Shizuku in the first place.

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=moe.shizuku.pr...

[1]: https://shizuku.rikka.app/

That uses a workaround based on WiFi debugging even though it's all local. It doesn't run if you're not connected to a trusted WiFi network, you have to set it all up when connecting to a new network, etc.

Not only users are not connected to WiFi all the time, but in many developing countries people often have no WiFi at home and rely on mobile data instead. It's a solution, but not a solution for everyone or a solution that works all the time.

And how do you estimate the audience that even cares about those issues?

I think number of people caring about alternative app stores, F-droid or whatever is very similar to the number of people willing to use adb if necessary, so rather small.

But the ecosystem exists, regardless of what the absolute number is, and it would be bad to lose it. If the platform was more open like Windows the ecosystem would grow, if it was less open like iOS it would die.

Somehow I think having to use ADB instead of something like F-Droid with automatic updates would put a damper on things.

how many people ll do this though? i would expect sub 1% conversion from existing users if they had to do that

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