> In the Chinese app store market [there are] five to ten commonly used app stores, and yet even the largest has less than a majority market share. Most Chinese people have more than one app store on their phone, so there is no monolith there, whereas “outside of China, Apple and Google control more than 95 percent of the app store market share”. Ecosystems with multiple app sources work, and governments around the world believe that monopoly forces are what keeps Google Play and Apple App Store dominant.
The interesting counterpoint to this, though, is that China is less concentrated in spots 1-5, but way more concentrated comparing the Top 5 vs. the rest.
Among Internet brands, the classic $100bn+ market cap companies of Tencent/Alibaba/Meituan/PDD/JD/Bytedance are followed by Baidu/Kuaishou both around $30bn and then not many other meaningful names.
Compare this to the US where Google/Amazon/PayPal/Netflix/Facebook/Booking.com/Airbnb/Uber/Square/eBay/DoorDash/Zoom form a much smoother distribution, probably because the scaling advantages of US app stores.
That's because all the top companies in any sector in China are subsidized and heavily supported by the government. The distribution isn't as organic, it's more a matter of in China, crossing the threshold to being the "golden child" and being guaranteed success right after.
I don't know enough to support their extreme position, but for the sake of information:
Part of it is state-owned banks (the dominant form of banking in China) offering attractive lending to state-owned enterprises, as loan officers avoid the risk of being accused of corruption.
Also, there likely is/was more direct encouragement of exporters (e.g. by subsidies), similar to other countries, but my source doesn't specify if this currently applies to China.
Source: Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (2010)
None of the top Chinese tech companies are state-owned. Also 2010 was before Xi Jinping. Things have changed a lot now. Now they get striked left and right by regulations. Just look at their stock price.
I'm not sure where you guys are coming from, but the top officials of China acknowledges this is an issue. Are you saying that they are wrong and that China doesn't have a huge problem with corrupt officials? Or why else are you questioning these things?
In fairness accusations of corruption to remove political opponents or "troublemakers" have a long and storied history of application by genocidal dictatorships like China, democracies, and basically every form of government.
So merely having an accusation doesn't really say much.
From what I know about how things work, the argument makes sense. Just denying won't cut it. You need to propose an alternative view. I am willing to listen.
Serious and thoughtful question here, since this may sound flippant -
Could the Apple ecosystem of devices be the factor that enables the distribution of market caps? (Very interesting point, by the way)
I wonder if it explains the somewhat odd gap in the middle of the China market cap distribution, since Android absolutely dominates the China market at the tail end and Apple dominates at the high end.
Apple conflates their walled garden with the high perceived value of their devices, which I'm intentionally ignoring for the purpose of this question.
The competition is in many things in Asia we also have Amazon competing with homegrown services as well as Chinese large companies. With how much US politicians harp about free market and competition its funny to me to see that China seems to have a freer market and more competitive landscape. As the Communist party does not want any single company to dominate and get out of its control they do not allow any 1 company to dominate too much so all services and products have competitors.
It would be interesting to review how good the end products are. Competition for competitions sake isn’t worth much. You want competition to provide better services. But in a lot of ways, Apple has so much market share because their products are just so remarkably good.
People don’t buy AirPods because they are locked in, they buy them because they are an absolute marvel of technology.
Apple products are absolutely not "remarkably" good though. They aren't bad at all, but certainly not anywhere NEAR equating the value with the cost. Apple is 100% a luxury brand at a very premium price for most items.
Apple has the market share they do because they copied the playbook of fashion marketing and applied it to technology products in a time of significant industry change. They have continued to make some innovations of course, but mainly in business strategy and marketing. Their products are never really cutting edge technology nor are they remotely the best value for the cost.
Apples takes existing but not mature technology and makes it fashionable then ties it to their ecosystem. You can't even use air-tags without fully getting into the Apple system.
>Apple products are absolutely not "remarkably" good though.
That's a matter of opinion. The times I have actually tried the good value competitors options that are supposedly just as good at half the price, it's not a good experience at all. Most competitors put everything it to a couple of specs that look good on a comparison sheet while neglecting the complete experience. Yeah the obscure android phone might have a 4k display and more ram at a lower price, but they only give 1 year of updates and the ROM is full of bugs and malware.
Having gone through a lot of laptops from a lot of OEMs, the current M series macbooks are the only ones which have actually seemed close to flawless. The value you get is incredible.
Airpods are not demonstrably better than other headphones on the market by any other standard than their integration with iOS, that sounds like lock in to me... "Oh you've got an iphone? If you want the headphones that work best with iphone you better buy them from the company that makes iphone!"
This kind of feeds in to the original point though. The iPhone supports the full bluetooth feature set so 3rd party headphones work fine. The AirPods are only able to do a little bit extra by having the ability to have any part of the OS changed to support them better. This is something that requires a high trust level, you could never expose this access to any 3rd party device.
So it put the AirPods on a level playing field with everyone else, we would have to cripple them because they would have to exist in the same low trust environment. Is this actually better for consumers?
It depends on the size of the company doing it - i.e. on how impactful the lock-in actually is. But I feel that certainly a boundary past which not crippling such proprietary integration would be more economically harmful overall, despite the convenience.
Correct. "It just works" means either they're accessing a private API or there's unique parts of the firmware that no one other than Apple has access to.
Not really, because they host apps for incompatible devices (I also noticed this actually, it would have made more sense to say that each controlled over 95% (or 85 vs 100 or whatever) of the total app market for the platform)
One could argue that the act of 'curation' happens before the stores even begin to offer anything, because anyone with a sense of self-preservation in a regime that likes heavy political censorship will have an instinct for what is within acceptable bounds. And that is before we get to people on boards that keep hands on the pulse and so on.
I guess what I am saying is: "Absolute number of stores does not equal better access to anything." For all my beef with Apple and Android ecosystems, there are ways to bypass most of it ("control over market"). I am not sure, it is an option in China despite having 5 stores as opposed to 2.
Google is pretending that there's user choice in app stores on Android, but it's very clear that Google Play gets preferred treatment in various ways.
I just switched Android phones last week, and the system offered me to copy over everything through plugging a USB C cable into both phones.
To my surprise, Google/Android copied over all apps installed through Google Play, and just ignored all F-droid installed apps!
Not even a notice or message that not everything could be copied...
> To my surprise, Google/Android copied over all apps installed through Google Play, and just ignored all F-droid installed apps!
As an Android dev, I suspect it's not actually copying the apps over, but rather looking at what apps you have and redownloading them (and maybe copying over app data/the cache), as there may be some device specific customization in the APK's: https://developer.android.com/guide/app-bundle
> An Android App Bundle is a publishing format that includes all your app’s compiled code and resources, and defers APK generation and signing to Google Play.
> Google Play uses your app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs for each device configuration, so only the code and resources that are needed for a specific device are downloaded to run your app. You no longer have to build, sign, and manage multiple APKs to optimize support for different devices, and users get smaller, more-optimized downloads.
iOS does something similar when you move phones: it only sends over a list of apps to download from the App Store. Even your TestFlight apps don't make it over.
Yes. I had the same problem with F-Droid. I also used to use the Humble Store app back when they had one, same problem.
A good feature is that the Android OS allows you to whitelist sources of Apps, so once you install a "store" you can grant permission to that store to install apps without completely disabling the OS installer security. That didn't used to be a thing - either the setting was Play Store Only or it wasn't and you could grab APKs from the browser.
Huh? AFAICT there's no longer an authorized Android process to replace your phone off of their cloud. You ran an app from one of your phone vendors and they copied whatever they wanted to?
I guess the process was driven by my new phone: Google Pixel 6a.
I guess Google's "we'll get you started by copying everything off your old phone" process can do whatever it wants, but it surely didn't explicitly say "we'll only copy Google Play apps" in a way that I noticed.
there is user choice in app stores. that's literally why f-droid exists.
of course google play gets preferred treatment on a pixel phone. that's what happens when you own the platform - you get to prefer your app store. but other stores do exist and you can use them if you want. in what way is that not user choice?
Aside from the backup/restore functionality mentioned by the parent post, there's no way for them to do automatic updates or get similar system privileges like play store does, restricting a lot of functionality that play store can provide.
This article seems at odds with itself if I'm reading it correctly.
The augment put forth is partly that an app store / hub not accepting all possible apps is a form of censorship, but simultaneously asserts that that there are too many apps and an app store that doesn't accept all apps is providing a "curation" service that is beneficial to the user.
Maybe they are trying to make a delineation between a large scale app store and a small scale app store, but the point doesn't feel well defined or fleshed out.
Unsure what was meant by the statement "The freedom to get apps will always be in tension with the things that people want to keep out of their life"... applications being available to install doesn't mean you have to install them.
I agree that the iOS App Store and Google Play store enjoy a monopoly over much of the world, but I don't see that China has a less censored market. I understand China to have far greater government censorship over the internet and their applications than most other regions, so having a more even market share over multiple app stores doesn't necessarily improve the censorship issue.
"The big default app stores are full of millions of crap apps trying to monetize you, and F-droid only has a few thousand high-quality open source apps created to actually benefit you" might be a little less roundabout, if not too on the nose.
The censorship angle makes sense regarding app devs who complain about getting their app removed for unknown "policy violations", and the fact that a would-be malware dev would (hopefully) hesitate before publishing on an open-source repo is a positive type of curation/censorship.
> The augment put forth is partly that an app store / hub not accepting all possible apps is a form of censorship,
I believe they are saying that a _monopolistic_ app store that doesn't accept all apps is a form of censorship. And then the article (along with some comments in this thread) explain how Google Play and Apple App Store are monopolistic
It is not about scale as much as the possibility of getting apps from multiple sources. Each source can set its own curation policies, and each user can choose the sources they want. And for things that people want to keep out of their life, lots of people don't want NSFW images on their phone, but they want easy access to all the apps they want. What is NSFW in one country could be totally fine in another country (e.g. images of people wearing tank tops or swimsuits).
Stop using smart phones as your primary computer. As radio transmitting devices you will never be allowed to control them. You don't have the license, the telco does. It seems crazy to me that, apparently, you have to have high technology knowledge to install arbitrary software. Isn't that the primary thing you do on a computer?
The mega-corporations will not change. It is up to you to change your behavior.
It’s far far too late for this kind of finger wagging. In developing countries, a smartphone is the only device many people have. You see stories of people learning to code on a $100 android phone and Bluetooth keyboard.
This trend will not reverse ever. What can happen is governments can force the companies to open things up. They don’t even have to regulate. They can just dangle the threat of regulation and companies will move first. Apple has been doing a whole lot to open up repairs and the OS. It’s not far enough but it’s moving in the right direction.
That's exactly what I said. It will not reverse, ever. The only thing you can do is the only thing anyone has ever been able to do: change their own behavior. And that is very easily possible.
I am not suggesting that everyone will change. I am suggesting that you, reading this text, chose to change. Or not, but I figure people on HN definitely have the positive liberty to be able to.
> As radio transmitting devices you will never be allowed to control them.
There are actually two parts in a smartphone: the baseband/radio processor and the app processor. They are both complete systems, with their own CPU and software, sometimes, each have their own chip. The baseband controls the radio as well as a few other devices, it runs proprietary code, usually an encrypted, signed blob. It is only accessible through a well defined interface and doesn't run arbitrary code. This is the part you can't control.
The app processor is the thing that runs your main OS (ex: Android) and all your apps. It can run arbitrary code and that's the "computer", the part you can control.
In a traditional PC, the baseband could take the form of a PCIe card, and in fact, it is often exactly that. For example, a lot of laptops have a separate WiFi module slotted into the main board.
I really think Apple needs to allow alternative stores.
I don't have anything against Apple's app store, and I think it's up to them how they want to run it, what they want to include or not, what policies and requirements they want to set, even what payment processor they will accept.
But as a user, I want to be able to choose a store that can make different choices... like f-droid, or maybe something completely different.
Plus, I think Apple has little to fear. You can have alternative stores on Android devices and it's not killing the Google store.
Also: MacOS already allows you to install software from different places. It's not some dystopian malware armageddon.
They have lots to fear as they get a 30% cut.
One "simply" needs to launch their own app store and save millions, and aggregate other companies on their store. I can think of Epic Games as a first thought, but I am sure the list is lengthy.
You can provide the app on both and make all IAPs 30% cheaper on the alt store. Most apps already make purchases 30% more on the app vs their web version.
Their argument is that that service is provided continuously by virtue of people having (and buying year after year) the handsets that you’re trying to install on.
So this all comports: you’re free to make your own App Store and not get the 30% cut, but in exchange you will not have a billion device user base on day 1 to ship your apps to.
By the same argument, I could say that you're free to start your own gasoline station, but in exchange you will not be compatible with the Ford Gasoline Nozzle which may only be used with a 30% cut going to Ford.
The market for applications is entirely separate from the market for hardware. By tying the two together, Apple is dipping into a revenue stream that they have no right to, just as Ford has no right to profits from sale of gasoline.
Of course it's a matter of opinion. Practically all important questions are matters of opinion. Any preference you can possibly state about how the world should be is a matter of opinion. Whether the world is better for having eaten chocolate or vanilla ice cream is a matter of opunion. Whether a death is an accident to be ignored, a murder to be punished, or a heroic act to be praised is a matter of opinion. Any statement involving "should" or "ought" is a matter of opinion.
So when you say that the lines between markets is a matter of opinion, of course it is. When you say that Apple has a different opinion on the matter, of course they do. Those were not in dispute, and so your comment on it being "a matter of opinion" is both true, and so widely applicable as to convey effectively no meaning.
Instead, you could have responded with pointing out inconsistencies in the analogy given. You could have pointed out ongoing work done by Apple to justify the ongoing payments. These would have worked to shift the opinion on Apple's business practices, not merely to point out the general category of "matters of opinion".
Well one inconsistency in the analogy is straightforward: the gasoline and the automobile are obviously two distinct markets as an accident of history, whereas the smartphone hardware and smartphone software markets are not obviously distinct, also as an accident of history.
If you just assume the issue at hand resolves in your favor then it’s trivial to come up with analogs that appear in your favor! It just isn’t very convincing.
Consider if 50%+ of people moving from horse and buggy to automobiles picked Ford and in order to support this new market creation Ford had to invest billions to create gas stations all over the country. It does not seem crazy at all that they would prevent other manufacturers from utilizing those gas stations, and that they’d take a cut from every gas station operator who chooses to service the giant market that Ford created.
Thank you for engaging, and I hope that my previous comment wasn't too harsh. I get rather frustrated at the "matter of opinion" statement being used as if it were a conclusion, rather than being used to guide discussions.
Regarding the gasoline/automobile being "obviously two distinct markets" and computing software/hardware being "not obviously distinct", I'd say that's a description of how the markets current are, and not a argument for how they ought to be. I intentionally selected an analogy where two complementary good (gasoline/automobiles) are treated as separate markets, to state that goods being complementary, just as computing hardware/software are complementary, does not mean that they are the same market.
> Consider if 50%+ of people moving from horse and buggy to automobiles picked Ford
Looking it up, Ford did have 56% of US automobile market share in 1920 [0]. Not really relevant to either of our arguments, but was interesting to find.
> and in order to support this new market creation Ford had to invest billions to create gas stations all over the country.
I tried to find history of gas stations, to see what historic parallels could be drawn, but it looks like gasoline was either sold at general stores or hardware stores, with dedicated gas stations being either owned independently or by oil companies, and were started in response to the rise in automobile ownership [1]. That is, the existing infrastructure was used for the automobile.
I'd say this is a pretty good parallel for Apple's App Store. The existing infrastructure for software deployment, the internet, was and is the primary method by which software is distributed to iOS. This infrastructure predates Apple, and is a far larger part of the software deployment. Apple's primary role is not one of enabling software deployment (i.e. enabling deployment where it would otherwise be impossible), but one of restricting software deployment (i.e. preventing software deployment where it would otherwise be possible). That strikes me as entirely undeserving of an extra cut of payments.
Another potential analogy would be in vehicle repairs. Your manufacturer warranty is valid, even if the car is serviced by a mechanic not employed by the manufacturer. This required legal battles to resolve, and established that even closely tied markets such as car sales and car repairs should be considered as separate markets.
This is about as correct as saying people support everything the government does because they voted for them. But the reality is there aren’t that many choices and too many results are bundled in with one choice.
Maybe apple makes the nicest hardware and someone buys for that reason but it doesn’t mean they support the App Store lock-in.
Removing a competitor's apps in retaliation for them shipping their own app store sounds like exactly the kind of thing that existing anti-trust regulations would cover just fine, at least in EU.
This is exactly what the case study looked like for Microsoft when they were producing phones and were just getting their app store up and running. People were hesitant because their app store didn't have all the apps they used like YouTune, Facebook and Twitter.
The one classic example is how Google refused to allow MS to have a YouTube app in their store - that single app alone kept thousands of people from switching to the MS mobile platform which in turn contributed to their low market share and eventual collapse and MS killing off most of their mobile platform.
Apple will make that decision for you. I'll bet anything they would require exclusivity for listing in their store (in the event they're forced to allow for third party installs).
I am wondering why Epic Games comes to mind, but not Steam? I see this happen quite often.
I have nothing against Steam or Epic Games; rather, I am curious why the discourse around the two seems to be different, even though they're quite similar as services?
Did Epic Games do "something wrong" (not sure what the right term here is, please do suggest a better one if it comes to mind) in comparison to what Steam does?
I feel like the introduction of "store exclusives" really grated badly on an already well established Steam user base.
Gamers, and PC gamers in particular, are quite stubborn. I suspect there's a lot of loyalty to Steam for many reasons and Epic making their own copycat store split their already well-curated libraries. That and they literally yanked games already released on Steam and moved them to Epic, so I'd say that's where most of the bad blood comes from.
It's apple's appstore that is being dystopian. Not being able to install free apps without providing a credit card is ridicilous. I have 0 apps from the appstore on my work laptop for this reason.
Meh I don’t see much issue with this. I think they should be able to run their AppStore however they want but it’s when they tie in too many products together like the iPhone and the App Store that it becomes an issue because you simply can not have alternatives this way.
If you could install your own App Store, there would be no issues.
I think Apple needs to get back on the web app train and make iOS Safari more useable for people to do things in safari and not have to create a native application.
I'd argue it's really good in 2022. We only distribute our software as a web app these days. Many of our customers exclusively use iOS Safari to access it.
We even got the PWA stuff working reliably. Our web app runs full-screen on iOS devices and is launched from an icon on the home screen. For most users, there is absolutely zero difference between this and a native iOS app experience.
I did this some years ago for a game and at that time many APIs were completely broken, the most important one being push notifications.
Has that changed now in your experience?
Do you have a set of guidelines or boilerplate css/js to do this? I want to do the same but the solutions I've seen online and tried have been a mixed bag.
Microsoft got hit with anti-trust enforcement for doing a small fraction of what Apple does. Both political parties in the U.S. seem to have abandoned anti-trust regulation in the past 20 years.
Microsoft got hit because it had, what, >90% of the desktop PC market? And that at the time where the mobile market was so niche (Palm etc) that it could be disregarded.
Apple is hovering around 50% of the market. It's certainly market-dominant, but by the standards of the 90s and the Microsoft anti-trust case, it's nowhere even close. By the pre-Bork standards, that's a very different story. Here's how we used to run things:
"The District Court found that the merger would increase concentration in the shoe industry, both in manufacturing and retailing, eliminate one of the corporations as a substantial competitor in the retail field, and establish a manufacturer-retailer relationship which would deprive all but the top firms in the industry of a fair opportunity to compete, and that, therefore, it probably would result in a further substantial lessening of competition and an increased tendency toward monopoly. ... The District Court was correct in concluding that this merger may tend to lessen competition substantially ... The judgment is affirmed."
And how much market share did the two companies in question have?
"... the combined share of Brown and Kinney sales of women's shoes (by unit volume) exceeded 20%. In 31 cities -- some the same as those used in measuring the effect of the merger in the women's line -- the combined share of children's shoes sales exceeded 20%; in 6 cities, their share exceeded 40%. In Dodge City, Kansas, their combined share of the market for women's shoes was over 57%; their share of the children's shoe market in that city was 49%. In the 7 cities in which Brown's and Kinney's combined shares of the market for women's shoes were greatest (ranging from 33% to 57%), each of the parties alone, prior to the merger, had captured substantial portions of those markets (ranging from 13% to 34%); the merger intensified this existing concentration. In 118 separate cities, the combined shares of the market of Brown and Kinney in the sale of one of the relevant lines of commerce exceeded 5%. In 47 cities, their share exceeded 5% in all three lines."
You can “install” the apps from the web. Their called PWA. People have been trained to just download apps from the App or Play store.
Now some apps have to be native, but most of the apps I see people using can be saved as a PWA and still do the almost the same stuff the do in the native app. Ie doom scroll for hours.
>and I think it's up to them how they want to run it
But it isn't. Or it shouldn't be. Apple is a corporation, and as long as the corporation is an American corporation, the corporation should be regulated for the benefit of the citizens of America. (insert laugh track here)
For discovery, I no longer use app stores, music streamers, youtube, amazon, etc. I am stuck with time wasting organic searching. I think there is a huge market for trustworthy curation. Google may have beat out Yahoo, but I think it will cyclically turn back around as all platforms become more and more inundated with junk that drowns out valuable content.
> I think there is a huge market for trustworthy curation
There is a huge market for trustworthiness in general. It's getting really hard to get honest advice anywhere these days. It's nothing but sales pitches.
If I've already made a billion being scum it pays for me to buy your trustworthy platform when it is still in the millions stage, then corrupt it and pump as much money out of it as possible based on its good name.
We see this on non internet products often. Some popular 'small farm' product gets bought by a megacorp but they don't change their marketing.
> I think there is a huge market for trustworthy curation.
+ 1000x. This has been on my mind for a while. The problem of decision fatigue. I was trying to explain this to my parents and in-laws recently: If you go to a library, and there are
1. 2 books, how much time will you need to decide between the two?
2. 10 books, how much then?
3. 1000 books?
And does your happiness increase with the amount of choices?
I don’t want only content some algo thinks I’ll enjoy. (At least not exclusively)
I also want to know what other people are interested in. The context that my friend thinks thing thing is ‘the best thing they’ve ever seen’ could make it worth consuming, even if it’s way out of my wheel house.
Brave Goggles was the last project I saw that gave a hope that something more curated could be enables on (web) search results. But it doesn’t seem to have gone far.
> One common complaint about decentralized systems is that they work badly. (...) Ecosystems with multiple app sources work,
Emphasis mine. It goes from claiming they don't "work badly" to finally conceding they merely "work", no attempt to demonstrate that they work well.
Apparently a great example is Windows, a notorious dumpster fire so filled with unverifiable garbage it spawned a secondary market of antivirus software.
Or GNOME software, which I assume they just meant Linux software, where apt/dnf/Flatpak/Snapcraft has definitely not caused user confusion and a million help articles about how to use it and which to use with weird fan rivalries over which ones should take the crown (I'm referring to the animosity around Snap vs alternatives) /s. Or works so well it allows users to accidentally delete their desktop environment [1].
Don't know much about the Chinese app store market, but it's not like any Chinese market could be considered decentralized when the central government has deeper restrictions on apps than any Western app store.
Oh come on, you can say a lot of things about Linux, but GNOME's software centre is as user friendly as it gets. You don't even need to worry about which package manager it uses.
Pop store is a different story, but that's a very specific thing.
Depends on the distro. Many distros don't integrate perfectly, some require additional configuration/setup around PackageKit, and there are a lot of customer complaints around various basic issues. One common example: the software centre showing "No Application Data Found". Another common issue: updates don't really work, the workaround is to use the underlying package manager to perform updates.
GNOME's software centre issues very clearly stem from the diversity of package managers and formats and environments it has to support because Linux actually has a decentralized application ecosystem. On Android, F-Droid likes to claim that the "technical skill" needed to install other packages is an artificial barrier which is just imposed by Google, yet it merely piggybacks off the usability & simplicity of Google's centrally developed package formats (.apk or .appbundle) and package manager (PackageManager). When the ecosystem is actually decentralized, GNOME software shows just how user unfriendly things become.
Yeah, as far as I've tried to use it, I've found it's pretty good on Fedora (basically the flagship GNOME distro) and that's mostly it. It hasn't worked very well at all for me on Ubuntu.
gnome's software center is fine if you know what you want and it's in the repos. the discoverability is essentially nil though - yeah, there's some browsing and categories, but the categorization is poor and more popular apps aren't surfaced in any meaningful way.
it's great if you're an indie software developer who cares about things like fairness and other apps not being featured above your own, but it's certainly a long ways off from the app store experience of android or iOS in nearly every metric that my mum might care about.
Only if you develop on safari. On good browsers you can do pretty much everything. Apple intentionally cripples safari so that it can't compete with their app store.
There are still things non-Safari browsers can't do, like send & receive SMS, set precise alarms/timers, handle SIP calls, customize your OS home screen, create overlays, etc. Even beyond Apple's agenda, there will always be things that are impractical for the web to do because it's cross-platform, and also dangerous for untrusted code to do. For example, basically all browsers have removed high-precision timing capabilities because it's too dangerous for untrusted code.
Also, web performance is still a concern on mobile devices which means it's still impractical as a native replacement for some use cases.
Even if I go on to install the app from the Play store, I use f-droid to filter down to non-user hostile apps in oversubscribed categories like soduko apps.
I don't understand what about this decentralized idea that f-droid is selling me ... that I'm supposed to LIKE here?
I develop apps, I get the downside of these centralized services for me, but I'm not sure what they're selling me as a user here.
They seem to sell me on privacy / censorship concerns, but I see no privacy benefits stated. I don't see any reason distributed stores are more privacy focused. China is their example? If anything that indicates the store itself is less of a potential privacy / censorship issue than other factors.
>From the point of the user, the ideal app store would contain exactly what the user wants, and not one thing more.
I don't really care if there are more apps on there that I might try and not use. I don't understand what I'm being sold here / why I would like that / how that even could happen.
it wasn't until rather recently that I discovered that the f-droid model is actually decentralized... the various clients are still rather rudimentary (catering to the converted and knowledgeable) but the potential is obvious.
one killer feature that is still nascent (except for a few KDE apps) is to offer complete bundles of compatible open source apps, e.g., with uniform look and feel and, maybe, interoperability. in an open source world there is no reason why the metadata of different projects could not be used more actively to provide a high quality experience.
thats a good initiative, though I had more in mind something like the different linux desktop distributions. Maybe thats not possible on android or maybe its a matter of time.
Do you think app publishers want that? I don't want my apps on any place but the App Store or Play store and I own the copyright on them which gives me full control of distribution.
The App Store app or the App Store backend repository?
I'm talking about the backend services being opened up so that it can be utilized by other clients. Apps can be gated behind payment or authorization similar to how RHEL or SLES package managers work.
Its interesting to think what the scenario would be had Microsoft Mobile hung in there and continued to build Windows phones and did a better job of courting developers and making it easier to build and port apps to their app store.
Would we still be having this discussion about the limitations of only two players in the marketplace?
I honestly don't know, but I always thought they had a good thing going and provided a lot of competition to both platforms. The bad thing is then Google and Apple went out of their way to not put any of their apps in the MS app store (youtube was a classic example), essentially cutting them off in order to get rid of the competition.
My long term outlook is there will never be a third competitor to either because now they own so much of the apps, it will be easy to starve off any competitor who wants to promote their apps for another platform. They've already proved already their willing and able to do anything to keep their dominance, sans a lawsuit over anti-competitor or monopolistic business practices.
they have an inclusion policy[2] for apps in their index which requires an OSS license but doesn't say anything about moderation standards, but they do say 'Trademarks must not be infringed, and any other legal requirements must be adhered to'.
Third party repositories are not under our control what so ever. If you think a 3rd party repository is violating your rights you will have to get in contact with their respective operators. Procedures described here apply exclusively to f-droid.org."
One of those alternate app repositories for F-Droid is the IzzyOnDroid repo: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/
Highly recommended.
I'll also recommend people use an app like FoxyDroid instead of the default (barebones, visually unappealing, and feature-stunted) F-Droid app. I install the F-Droid app only for downloading and installing FoxyDroid itself.
Curation becomes moderation when you get too big. It's the reason that anti-trust laws work differently than the rules that apply to mom & pop shops.
It's a constant source of friction with quasi-monopolists, whose employees bristle about how they'd feel if they went independent and their own company was held to these standards. Your $10M company doesn't have to do this stuff. Nor your $1B company 9 times out of 10. But if you're FAANG you're goddamned right you have to follow these extra rules.
What I'd hope we'd get in this space here is metacuration. Give me a curated list of curators for subject areas. I want a feed that's 30% environmentalism, 20% futurism, and a mix of random stuff I should care about but maybe don't look at too often.
I believe this reduces the censorship element by splitting responsibility into more of a chain.
Also decentralization is rather contributing to generate those millions of apps - repo A will have a different version of App M than repo B or a fork and anyway similar apps but from different sources and... well good luck.
That's what they're saying, which is ridiculous. "F-Droid gives you selected apps by default without bans or censorship" is positively thrilling cognitive dissonance.
I'm biased to appreciate that F-Droid even exists but providing a default list is not cognitive dissonance, and what you've said suggests that you may have missed the author's point.
You can connect whatever "collection of apps" source you desire but you're correct that you do get the "F-Droid List" out of the box.
It may feel odd to show no apps when initially using F-Droid but, in theory, one improvement may be to have the user explicitly choose a source list and maybe the "F-Droid List" is first in the list among others.
Going in that direction would also help expose that particular feature as I wasn't even aware that you could add / change sources for F-Droid, which sounds like if easy enough to add may be an easier avenue to self publish apps than the major app stores.
I think the article addresses this pretty well. The answer is even in the title.
> If f-droid.org is the one source of software, then our curation would be censorship, since we would be preventing speech. [...] That’s where decentralization comes in. Decentralization means people can choose who they trust in a fine-grained way, not all or nothing. We have put a lot of work into making it easy for anyone to make their own app repos, and those repos can follow any rules that its creators want.
Basically, if you curate apps in one location without preventing others from curating/publishing/installing apps to/from other locations (ie decentralization), then it is not censorship
Harsh, even if true. Keep in mind though, F-Droid is a woefully under-funded effort. I mean, Play Store is funded by a megacorp that brings in $500M/day in revenues.
Terrible idea, the reason why Apple is so popular is that the apps are extremely diverse. Being suggested here is an app store with apps curated by computer nerds who think they are diverse but are probably left biased. Terrible. If you want curation, go on to the Apple app store Today, Games and Apps tab pages. For everyone else there is the Search tab. A good balance.
I have been using Android since Nexus 2 and iPhone since 6s. Never in my life I felt like I have experienced censorship in default app stores.
If they are against the monopolized market make a clear argument, preferably consumer-focused. Don’t hide behind “censorship” and abstract ideas that have proven not to scale - such as users should be able to chose who they trust. This shows such an insane disconnect from the reality of the vast majority of consumers that it’s laughable to include it.
And as usual, a great example of a censorship free open market - China.
> Never in my life I felt like I have experienced censorship in default app stores.
You're thinking of censorship as a consumer that I presume lives in a developed country. Consumers elsewhere can face censorship [0][1]. I hope this can change your perspective a little bit.
Any local alternative app store is a far easier target for government censorship. Look at Chinese and Russian Android app stores. They comply immediately, often without even publicizing that. Apple at least takes longer to force to comply.
I mean… yes, censorship exists in many countries, including the US. If China forced _Apple_ to abide by their rules I struggle to imagine how an alternative store would avoid that. Biggest Chinese app stores are tightly managed by the state, same as the entirety of their tech market.
With free software and decentralized repositories, users in each country can decide which software they want to distribute and how. If someone thinks a local ban is unjust, they know they have the right and the tools to redistribute any app that is in f-droid.org, or other free software repositories. Free software is central to an effective decentralized ecosystem.
This reasoning doesn't seem particularly sound to me. On the topic of knowing whether or not something's been censored from reaching your attention, it's possible that censorship efforts prevented you from even hearing about an app that you would want to install, which is not available in the default store. Consider a person in China who has never heard of Tank Man and how they might think they don't experience censorship (or, at least, Tank Man is not included in the censorship they do believe they experience).
Points you make in other comments about how official app stores are relatively "safe" for the average user are strong and I don't want to sound like I disagree with your conclusion. Just that this reason to believe "I have not experienced censorship" is misguided.
It's an interesting argument even though I don't fully agree with it. The Tank Man analogy is that even though the Chinese person has not actively pursued this topic, they experience the effects of censorship because this topic has been basically erased from their cultural space. So of course they do not pursue it - they can't ("they don't have a word for it" in Orwell's terms).
However, we are not discussing censorship as a state-level concern. An app censored on iOS can still exist as a web app or as an Android app. Apple's AppStore does not encompass the entirety of our cultural narrative. On the contrary, an app banned from AppStore often generates a lot of press.
(again, anecdotal) I can't remember a single app that I have discovered on the AppStore. The process always starts with hearing about an app from someone else, or reading about it.
> I can't remember a single app that I have discovered on the AppStore.
Does fairly well suggest that the store itself is not implementing censorship. Again, I don't want to sound like I disagree. Just wanted to pick your brain a bit more.
(I guess Apple could be involved with censorship efforts to prevent news from getting out about a ban, but that's obviously harder to do when the information is disseminated outside their store. The kind of censorship I suggested is much more of a state-level actor concern.)
That’s not due to censorship though. And yes - both iOS and Android have great adblockers. I use AdGuard Pro on iOS and my experience is as good as using uBlock origin on desktop.
Saying that, I agree that alternative rendering engines should be allowed in AppStore. Don’t think we need an alternative app store for that.
I have worked in IT for a few years and dealt with many very tech illiterate people. Apple AppStore is a relatively safe space for them, if they get scammed into installing an alternative MyApps store with a ton of trackers and other scam software they will suffer tremendously.
And if you have ever worked in IT or helped your extended family with tech issues you would know the difference between the web and iOS in terms of viruses, scam apps, tracking, ransomware, etc.
On your iPhone, why don't you try installing a browser that doesn't use the webkit engine? How about installing an emulator to play some classic games?
It's a little ironic you're demanding they make a clear argument when your argument is just a simple anecdote that doesn't even hold up well. Sure you haven't experienced censorship in default app stores because you aren't actually trying to do much with your device.
Maybe one of the websites you use frequently doesn't have good support for WebKit. They make sure Chrome works, and often test Mozilla, but 80% of the time they roll out a new feature it's broken in WebKit for a couple of weeks before the devs fix it. Yeah, you'd like to go to a different website, but you've had an account on this one for over a decade and know a lot of other users, or they get scoops that none of their competitors do, so that's just not going to work for you.
Or, the other browser implements part of the `webext` API that WebKit does not, and there's an extension out there that you'd really like to use. Maybe one that integrates with your existing password manager, or rewrites Twitter URLs to nitter.net, or whatever, and the extension just won't work with WebKit.
Or, maybe WebKit's JavaScriptCore just isn't fast enough for some web-based game you like, and you'd like to run a browser that uses V8 or SpiderMonkey instead.
You're right, a lot of users don't have these problems, and don't care... until maybe one day they do. And maybe 99% of users will never have these problems at all, but 1% of Apple's userbase is still a lot of users who could benefit from browser choice, one day.
Since you’re choosing the example here, is there a better one? This is just not a compelling thing even for most technical users, so if this is all we’re missing out on then it seems like a ringing endorsement for Apple’s curation.
Do I want you to be able to install an emulator? Of course. This is pure protectionism by a monopoly.
Do I want my family to be able to install a fake banking or health app? No.
So based on this principle, I would say jailbraking is a viable option for tech-savvy people who really need something special on their phone that is being unfairly restricted by Apple.
> And as usual, a great example of a censorship free open market - China.
If China looks like a more competitive and healthy ecosystem, as an anti-China person you can respond either by thinking that's a problem, or by smirking about China.
> make a clear argument
Their arguments are a lot clearer than yours, which seem to be an expansion of "oh, come on!" You're appstore-splaining to people who run a successful appstore by telling them they're out of touch.
Chinese market is tightly controlled by the state. They have very strict rules for how western tech companies must behave. They have forced even the biggest players to abide by their censorship laws.
And yes, they are out of touch. But not from ignorance - they are intentionally appealing to our sense of fairness while pursuing their own interests.
I am arguing against their appeal. Censorship, decentralization, freedom to chose who you trust, etc. It’s the same appeal crypto uses to deceive inexperienced people into believing that these things are really relevant to their life. It’s manipulative.
Personally I think these aspects are important and will probably play a bigger part in the future. But censorship is not why I think we should open up such a huge risk surface on iOS.
here's one example where app store policy disrupted one platform and thousands of people's lives: tumblr. the way it played out ended up very directly impacting online communities and creators. even those who might've been not as directly affected by policy changes, still end up getting disrupted by shifts in audience. those appstores end up affecting users well outside of where their reach supposedly ends, not limited to the actual customers of those appstores. they continuously engage in censorship, and it doesn't stop at 'good censorship', it can be opinionated, prudish, or materialistic and self-serving (such as, prohibiting apps from telling people that they can subscribe directly, instead of going through the appstore). personally I don't need a frigid nanny with a hollier-than-thou 'let us decide for you' attitude. but even when you pick a platform that won't involve being beholden to such decisions, you still end up getting fallout from other platforms that do make decisions like that, even though you're not using them. and this is why it's worth raising a huge stink about monopolistic control over platforms. some policy decisions end up spreading to everyone, no matter what platform they use.
with vague talk about twitter possibly getting some kind of boot from appstores, which will invariably result in some kind of act of censorship to mold it to fit the appstore policies, i don't really get how one could go 'yeah, these things aren't actually impacting people in their day-to-day life'. they absolutely do. literally all of those things mentioned are playing out in real time for twitter and people who use it or affected by it in some kind of way. which turns out to be increasingly everyone.
We have to fight censorship, not introduce a new attack vector that will result in a whole new class of scams targeted at hundreds of millions of people.
Tumblr, Twitter, TikTok - ok, let's focus on preserving access to these apps if you feel this is important. Allowing users to install any unverified app is a massive problem. Just look at what we use our phones for: banking, health, investment, personal info, 2FA, and more.
F-droid is safer (reproducible builds of open source software) than the Play Store (static analysis followed by dynamic analysis in a cloud emulator), which is safer than the Apple App Store (human looking at a HIG checklist).
To be clear, F-droid is an excellent piece of software. It's small and is used mostly by quite technical people, so it's not as an attractive target as Apple's AppStore. But that's the thing: some technical solutions work amazingly well for the 0.001% (like HN users). But they do not scale to tech illiterate people. It's a completely different problem space.
> I am arguing against their appeal. Censorship, decentralization,
freedom to chose who you trust, etc. It’s the same appeal crypto
uses to deceive inexperienced people into believing that these
things are really relevant to their life. It’s manipulative.
I'm sorry if I misread this. I read it through carefully a few times
now.
Did you just actually say that people's "freedom to chose who you
trust" is irrelavent to their lives?!
That must win the prize for the all time most patronising semtiment
I've read on HN. Surely you're trolling at this point?
In absolutist, idealistic terms - yes, everyone should be 100% responsible for who they trust, should have no limits on this choice.
In practical terms what we get is "Banks are not your friend" being proclaimed by a scammer arguing that you should trust them, not a tightly regulated industry. And millions of people suffer from that. Sure, "it's their fault" because they didn't "look into it".
Guys really, we need to start treating _choice_ as a first class
software feature, something more than a "nice" thing that we can just
snatch away from young or old people, or people we deem too stupid.
I don't know. On the one hand - yes, let's stop patronizing people. On the other hand we need to be responsible. There are many vulnerable people, they can't just get their shit together and become tech-savvy.
You and I differ on digital literacy. To me it's the only way to
ultimately solve this problem. It's not about educating people
technically. See my paper on "Digital Self Defence as Civic
Cyber-Security". Here in the UK we're taking that line (officially) at
last. And starting young!
Before limiting peoples' options to corporate walled gardens on the
assumption that "its safer" we can try actually scuring the products,
hardware and OS is the foundation. Got to stop listening to the
negative, defeatist voices who say "that's impossible".
And y'know there are laws against computer misuse. We ought to
seriously try enforcing them, even if that means the inconvenient
truth of exposing criminals with fancy brand names and logos. :)
I like your optimism and on my best days I mostly agree with it.
My skepticism is rooted in two phenomena:
1. Our society seems to be unable to address criminal behavior at the current scale, how can we expect it to improve if we expand the attack surface? Counties are unable to stop basic phone and tech support scams for decades now. There are just a few dozen companies that are responsible and we still fail. I can’t trust the authorities to be able to address more sophisticated scams at a bigger scale. Corruption is at the core of this. So now we also have to solve corruption.
2. Tech literacy is not enough to effectively avoid tech scams. It’s helpful for sure, but look at how many educated people got burned by crypto. I agree it’s work in progress and maybe we will become better as a society. But I need to see more proof to feel confident in that.
It is true that many essential organizations cannot effectively defend their networks. But it is also important to point out that there are many orgs that _are_ effectively defending their networks. I've worked in IT in a huge range of companies, orgs, and context. One thing that is clear is the culture plays a huge role. Those with a culture of supporting people who deal with real problems fare much better, those with a culture of "Cover Your Ass" or "When you say jump, I say how high" are getting hacked left and right.
I might sound too antagonistic on this topic, that's not my intention.
F-droid is a great app repository, no problem with them whatsoever. I am highlighting the fact that a purist argument for a technological change that does not extensively invest into understanding the negative impacts on consumers is bogus. How many iPhone users really need an alternative store? Versus how many iPhone users want to have safeties around installing apps critical to their well-being?
To your point: maybe a hard to enable setting for allowing sideloading would satisfy both the safety and the flexibility concerns. But at the end of the day, if I ever need a hackable device I will just get an Android or jailbrake my iPhone. I explicitly separate my own needs from what I perceive as a very dangerous change for 99.99% of iPhone users.
I agree with basically all the points in this thread, one thing that is missing is that most of these points are not mutually exclusive. A decentralized system like F-Droid does not close out the possibility of walled gardens, it just gives users choice of whether they want to remain in it. For example, you can buy a CalyxOS device now and only enable F-Droid as the app source. That is a walled garden of the safest kind: all free software reviewed by bots and humans before inclusion. Users then can opt into other sources.
We have recently implemented some rudimentary controls where you can use Device Admin mode to lock F-Droid to a given set of repositories. That strictly enforces the walled garden, but doesn't require a single monopolist have all the power.
>And as usual, a great example of a censorship free open market - China.
the article is talking about the Chinese consumer application ecosystem, not the state and is indeed correct on this. The platform ecosystem offers significantly more choice and Apple for example does not enforce its monopolistic powers as it does in the Western market. As a result you have genuine competition on the distribution end, like WeChat.
Alternatives are not competition in a highly state-controlled environment. It’s an appearance of competition. Exactly what the Chinese government wants.
I agree that censorship is not the best angle the article concludes on but I don't think "user choice, decentralization, and community-controlled curation" are abstract ideas. The article is concrete what this looks like practically speaking:
> This means F-Droid gives you selected apps by default without bans or censorship. When you install the F-Droid app, it automatically connects to the collection on f-droid.org that is maintained by this community. F-Droid also makes it easy for anyone to publish their own repository, with their own curation rules.
i.e., yes, you do get the "F-Droid List" by default, but you are welcome to connect to a different list or publish your own "list" of apps that has its own curation rules.
Imagine if you could view Apple or Google's app store with an "awesome app" list curated by a list of experts you follow without all the junk of suggested apps or ads. That would go in the direction of "meta-curation" akin to what /u/hinkley is referring to in a another comment [1].
Steam already has curators/curation lists exactly like you describe. They are usually not particularly interesting.
Anyone can make a web page with apps they think are great, and links to those apps that will go straight to store pages. Very few people do.
These are done rarely because there's little or no money in it. Give the curators a significant cut, and now you have a lot of curators and a lot of gaming of the system.
Now you need to curate the curators, which is still a significant problem.
Throughout all of that, you'll have those claiming that curation is censorship. They don't matter because you can never satisfy them.
Who ensures security in decentralized app stores? Curators, independently? Or can they "inherit" that from the major app stores?
With free software and reproducible builds, it is possible for small scale curators to inherit the security of the large scale curators. That is why they are key pieces of the f-droid.org collection.
> Imagine if you could view Apple or Google's app store with an "awesome app" list curated by a list of experts you follow without all the junk of suggested apps or ads.
My highschool history teacher once said the answer to nearly everything is money.
Why don't we have mobile app stores that operate in a manner similar to package managers? Money. Why can't I install what I want on my iPhone? Money.
This distinction is very minor. From my perspective there is almost no difference whether I am viewing a curated app list as a web page or as an alternative App Store. This has almost no consumer advantage and a vastly increased risk surface as an obvious downside.
This, from my perspective anyway, seems to be one of the biggest drivers of adoption for closed ecosystems. Users want to feel safe and not vet everything ( because it is hard to do well ) and it is genuinely hard to argue with that stance from a very pragmatic POV. As my friend once put it 'I don't want to spend my valuable time left fiddling'. For the argument you mention, I think I agree, because I still remember getting calls from family members, who installed something and now had constant unremovable popups everywhere.
That said, Apple seems to be more targeted now precisely ( compared to non-Apple linux and Windows ) because it has more people, who are lulled by the sense of security Apple curation model provides.
edit: I kinda get that the article is mostly about mobile devices, but the app-store concept appears to have moved to desktop world as well.
I agree - for most users safety is more important than "alternative stores".
This post is very manipulative in my view. It would be really easy to avoid that for the authors - just list the downsides of allowing any app to be installed on an iPhone. What are the consequences of allowing your parent to install "Bank of Amerika" on their phone? Exactly.
How people access apps is not a on/off switch between walled garden and dog eat dog free for all. Decentralized systems need to be designed with safety in mind, just like walled gardens do. Both can be done badly or done well.
Let's be fair - I don't think we're talking about simply swapping lists when you zoom out. At a minimum, any value prop would have to match the existing major app stores such as verifying binary sources, rejecting malicious apps, and the like.
I think the main question I see is - do multiple stores benefit the user?
I'm not sure of that answer but I think we can agree that multiple stores do NOT help the default app store, which in turn could be beneficial to the consumer (multiple stores that have to compete on pricing w/ deals, self publishers offering a cheaper price directly, etc. - think more like grocery stores selling the same stuff vs farmers market vs direct from farm).
I'm no economist but I think we could also agree that having at least a few options is generally A Good Thing.
edit: regardless, even in a world with multiple stores the point re: attack surface is a good one and one of your other comments regarding what users actually value like safety is an important one, which as a business are the things you need to weigh on to make a profit
I disagree that the main question is: "do multiple stores benefit the user?". The main question is: "Should the user have the choice in their stores?". Apple believes that their users should not have that choice, and Google used that to drive adoption with Android by making it more open. AS Google gained the market share and power, they locked down Android more and more to gain those monopoly-level profits. Based on data that was released as part of Oracle v. Google, it looks like they have over 40% profit margins. Plus notice how Google just cut their fee in half (30% to 15%). That means they were rolling in cash.
There are many alternative stores available for Android. In my experience this only leads to:
1. Less trusted software. Can I trust Russian Yandex app store? Can I trust Amazon app store?
2. Focus on upselling their own / affiliated apps.
3. No actual increase in choice. Some devices just come preinstalled with alternative stores for no other reason than their own monetary benefit.
4. A theoretical benefit that "I have choice" and if someone bans something I _might_ be able to install it from a different store. Of course oppressive regimes don't just ban apps, they often restrict internet in more severe ways.
