Alternate App Stores are hard
Alternate App Stores are hard
Posted Jun 8, 2025 6:02 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (guest, #10998)Parent article: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
Except, no, that's not the way it works. Android lets you have alternate App Stores. It's nice, but who uses them? I have F-Droid installed, but I'm also commenting on LWN. Amazon shut theirs down. Samsung has one, because they ship the phones with Samsung junk preinstalled, but I don't think anyone actually uses it. Publishers will stay on Google Play Store or Apple App Store because that's where the money is.
Amazon had a long fight about whether they had to pay the Google tax for Kindle books sold through Amazon and Kindle apps; they have come to some sort of agreement where you can't buy Kindle books on the Amazon app, but you can through the Kindle app. Amazon of all companies could have told people just install the Amazon app store, and saved 100% of payment processing, but they didn't even try.
As a consumer: does this new company App Store offer me anything the Google Play store doesn't? Is it cheaper? Can I trust it to protect me from malware? (As a computer professional, I can talk about Google Play's problem with malware, but I suspect the average Android user just thinks of it as 100% safe. Even as a computer professional, either the company is spending money and time to vet every program, which cuts into their margins and reduces the number of programs they have, or they're tossing it to an automated system that Google, with a decade of experience and a lot more manpower, probably have done much better.) What happens if they start fighting over some program? (Samsung and Google Play and Amazon App Store sometimes do.) What happens if I buy a program from there and they close shop? (Again, cf. Amazon App Store.) Are they going to be secure with my credit card details? Etc.