by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-01 21:15:15+00:00
> Every other platform "allows" third party installation given enough work, which is why it's valid to compare the difficulty of doing so on Linux with other platforms.

Sure, but the point being, it's a lot easier to install software from outside of the repositories on Linux than it is on Android. Measure by how often it happens. Do a significant percentage of desktop Linux users ever use something other than the official repositories? Yes. Do a significant percentage of Android users? Nope.

> Re: Steam. Microsoft absolutely does support that! If you install Steam, Windows breaks, and Steam isn't doing something disallowed like messing with internal data structures, then Microsoft will accept it as a bug in Windows. They work very hard to support apps even when they actually do mess with internals. It's the Linux world that shrugs if a change in Linux breaks Steam when Steam was doing nothing wrong.

I don't think this is accurate. If there is actually a bug in Linux, they'll accept the bug report regardless of whether you discovered it while using Steam or something else.

> Only target developers, and as such regularly do things like try to compile software during install and then fail due to obscure compatibility or versioning issues.

Nah. If you want to use some random AI thing or web thing that isn't in the main repositories, it's going to be telling you to install dependencies using those tools regardless of whether you're doing any software development.

> Have severe malware problems.

This is true but not unique. If you use a package distribution system and it has malware in it, it has malware in it. It doesn't matter if it's Google Play or pip or something else. It doesn't matter if it's operated by the same entity who made the device. What matters is if the people operating it do a poor job of excluding malware, and then some are better than others. Google Play has more malware than F-Droid or the Debian repositories; npm has more than Google Play.

> You couldn't present pip or npm to the Android team as a solution to the problem they're trying to solve.

The interface for some of those things are tuned for developers, sure. If you make an interface for ordinary people then it looks more like F-Droid than npm. But then that's what you'd do -- except that the F-Droid installer isn't allowed in Google Play, which leaves ordinary people in the chicken and egg where you have to do something technical to get access to the interface that makes it easy for ordinary people.

> You blame Android for being "arduous" whilst desktop Linux has spent decades with <5% market share exactly because it's so incredibly arduous.

Desktop Linux has been growing at a pretty significant rate. It's now above 5%, and it wasn't so long ago that it was under 2%.

The main problem isn't the difficulty of installing third party software but rather the network effect of getting people to make it to begin with. If hardly anybody uses it then developers don't make software for it and then people who e.g. want to play games get a Windows PC etc. Which makes it slower to gain market share. But despite that, the number keeps going up rather than down.

> even with these new policies it is much easier for both users and developers to access/make software on Android.

The thing you really need is the ability for someone who has never done it before to make Hello World and get it running on their own phone, and that is not easier on Android than on a Linux desktop.