What if a competing app store was "Grandma's App Store" and it had extreme moderation plus a huge cash bond that developers had to put up before being allowed on the store so you could install it as the exclusive store on your grandparents' phones and never have to worry about malware or semi-legit data exfiltration like contacts mining?
Or how about a highly moderated local store for my city where you need to be a resident and provide proof of owning a local business before being allowed on the store? That could be highly moderated and provide a ton of local business discovery with almost no risk of bad actors because being kicked off that store would mean a loss of local patrons.
Why is it automatically assumed competing app stores are going to be trash and why does everyone think Apple / Google are doing such an amazing job right now? Neither seem to be the case IMO.
I think your viewpoint focuses a lot on "what's good for me right now today" rather than "what's good for the long term health of these platforms?" Demand aggregation platforms, especially in industries with only a handful of huge players, are going to be bad for both suppliers and consumers.
You can already see it on every huge platform. The platform (aka distributor / allocator) doesn't care at all about either side. They only care about their share of the market as a distributor. Suppliers become a commodity because losing a supplier is minor churn with no real impact. It doesn't matter which 1 million developers you're dealing with as long as you have 1 million developers, so you might as well optimize for the developers that will accept the smallest profits and the most abuse.
On the consumer side it's the same thing. It doesn't matter which 100 million users you have as long as you have 100 million users. Banning 1 million users isn't a big deal because the platform isn't going to suffer as long as new users are coming in. It might be 1 million users that a specific supplier (aka developer, creator, etc.) relied on for their livelihood, but who cares, right? There's another supplier in line to take their place anyway. And so what if 1000 of those users banned were false positives right? That's only .001% of your user base. Tough luck for them if they lose access to an account they might depend on.
It really worries me to see the number of people that can't see beyond their own convenience to recognize the only winners in the current system are the platform owners. They don't care about you, developers, creators, gig-workers, etc. beyond how many of each they have.
Or how about a highly moderated local store for my city where you need to be a resident and provide proof of owning a local business before being allowed on the store? That could be highly moderated and provide a ton of local business discovery with almost no risk of bad actors because being kicked off that store would mean a loss of local patrons.
Why is it automatically assumed competing app stores are going to be trash and why does everyone think Apple / Google are doing such an amazing job right now? Neither seem to be the case IMO.
I think your viewpoint focuses a lot on "what's good for me right now today" rather than "what's good for the long term health of these platforms?" Demand aggregation platforms, especially in industries with only a handful of huge players, are going to be bad for both suppliers and consumers.
You can already see it on every huge platform. The platform (aka distributor / allocator) doesn't care at all about either side. They only care about their share of the market as a distributor. Suppliers become a commodity because losing a supplier is minor churn with no real impact. It doesn't matter which 1 million developers you're dealing with as long as you have 1 million developers, so you might as well optimize for the developers that will accept the smallest profits and the most abuse.
On the consumer side it's the same thing. It doesn't matter which 100 million users you have as long as you have 100 million users. Banning 1 million users isn't a big deal because the platform isn't going to suffer as long as new users are coming in. It might be 1 million users that a specific supplier (aka developer, creator, etc.) relied on for their livelihood, but who cares, right? There's another supplier in line to take their place anyway. And so what if 1000 of those users banned were false positives right? That's only .001% of your user base. Tough luck for them if they lose access to an account they might depend on.
It really worries me to see the number of people that can't see beyond their own convenience to recognize the only winners in the current system are the platform owners. They don't care about you, developers, creators, gig-workers, etc. beyond how many of each they have.