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Comment by rpdillon | Hacker News Reader

Parasitic? Writing software for folks' devices and selling it isn't parasitic...it's just participating in the market. Weird that the overton window has moved so far that anything not built by the trillion-dollar duopoly is considered some kind of free-rider.

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That trillion dollar duopoly is probably the worst case of free riders. It’s an enabler/vehicle for all the other billion dollar free riders to steal from the population.

It's not weird - you've just completely misunderstood the situation. This is about the OS, which the software in question (the alternate app store) relies on, but generates no revenue for. The devices are still being sold, because their manufacturers are allowed to make money, the alternate store is allowed to make money. Only the OS maker will make no money, because that would be bad.

Ah yes, Microsoft famously never made money off of Windows.

Are you not following? The OS maker in this case is Google.

Ah yes, Google historically lost money from Android.

You seem to imply Google was forced to open source Android or even to give it for free: sounded like it was a purely business decision to capture more of the market.

Now that they have, they are also turning around on bits of that too.

what you are arguing for is objectively extremely bizarre. if you take a step back, this is what is playing out: company C makes a device. it needs an operating system to run software, so they add it. if there was no operating system the device would be useless and no one would buy it. now person A buys said device. it's theirs, they have paid money for it, they own it. person B writes some software. it runs on the device's operating system. they want to sell it to person A. person A wants to buy it from them. why should company C be involved at all? I found this super weird and distasteful when game consoles were allowed to use this business model, and am even more taken aback that general purpose computers get away with it.

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