by jeroenhd | 2025-10-24 09:50:10+00:00
> Google got caught withholding search revenue from vendors who installed third party stores and punishing them in various other ways.

Interesting, do you have a link for that?

> Those are the phone vendor stores. Nobody wants those.

They have the same problem Apple's app store has: they lock you into a particular brand if you decide to spend money. Annoying, I agree, but 99% of app downloads are free anyway.

The real money is to be made with in-app purchases, but because people don't give alternative app stores a chance, they don't realize how much they're being scammed: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/bnbgmf/samsun...

> The phone vendor stores are all useless specifically because they're from the phone vendors, which means they'll be terrible because hardware vendors are notoriously bad at software, and on top of that they'll only be installed for people with that brand of phone, which again destroys the network effect.

The network effect never existed on desktop and Steam is doing just fine competing with the Microsoft Store.

As for software quality, 90% of smartphones is all software. If they were as bad at software as you say they are, smartphones would be unusable.

> Actual competitors would be the likes of Amazon or Epic or F-Droid, but Google's shenanigans have meant they all have negligible market share to the extent that Amazon even gave up.

F-Droid is widely used but only a fraction of consumers care about the things F-Droid cares about. Everyone who cares about open source on Android is served either by F-Droid directly or by another app leveraging the same ecosystem. There's no money to be made selling apps you can download for free elsewhere, though.

> you'd otherwise expect there to be a thousand bad ones and at least a dozen good ones since it's not that hard to set up an app store

But it is hard to set up an app store? The code for the app store itself isn't all that exciting, but convincing developers/publishers to use your app store is. Then things like localisation, payment, distribution, and in-app purchases pop up, which are technical challenges that are much harder to solve.

There's a reason Steam and GOG are essentially the only independent software stores left for video games other than buying games from publishers directly.

The lack of a network effect does make it hard to compete with the status quo, but part of that is that nobody really tries. What the big companies really want is to get the benefits of Google Play without having to pay the price. That's why they sued to "open up" the Google Play store rather than to force Google to make alternative app stores possible.

There are stores that do have the network effect, as they come pre-installed on billions of phones. But, as you said, "nobody wants those".

Trust me, I'd love for Google Play to get a repository feature where you can add and remove your own software sources so I wouldn't need to deal with the laggy F-Droid UI or the unmaintained Amazon App Store app, but the technical hurdles for getting app stores on phones is rather minimal.

For what it's worth, I think Netflix is the second biggest OS-independent proprietor of software apps, as their app comes with an Xbox Game Pass/Playstation Plus/Apple Arcade-style games catalogue available with your subscription. They use Google Play for binary distribution, but payment itself happens through your standard Netflix subscription. Again, a lot of people are angry that this alternative even exists because it's "bloat" but the network is there, ready to be leveraged.