Comment by pdonis
4 years ago
> This is a good example of how innovation, competition and small businesses are being stifled by the anticompetitive behavior of the mobile app distribution cartel.
No, it's an example of how small businesses are foolishly making their business model dependent on a company that is known to be unreliable. What should be happening is that mobile app distributors should not be depending on Google at all; alternate mobile app stores should be out-competing them by providing better service to developers. If there is a "cartel" that is making that difficult, it's not the mobile app store gatekeepers, it's the mobile phone companies that are tilting the playing field sharply in favor of the Android phones they distribute, which are tied to Google Play Store, instead of allowing free and open competition in phone operating systems.
What else is a mobile game dev supposed to do? Ask customers to sideload? Tell people to use f-droid? If they do that they're restricting themselves to a tiny fraction of the possible audience and thereby removing any chance they have of being profitable.
> What else is a mobile game dev supposed to do?
Start a startup to make a mobile app store that out-competes Google. Somebody is going to have to do it sooner or later. Young devs with nothing to lose are the best people to try.
Epic tried to get people to sideload Fortnite, and it was not successful. Epic is a billion dollar company. The right content is not the problem here.
> Start a startup [...] that out-competes Google
You know, I don't think that "just be better than the trillion dollar incumbent" is a reasonable starting point for any healthy market.
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Is this a risk that you're willing to take? A handful of kids can (and frequently do) make awesome indy games. But how do you expect them to scale out a competitive software distribution platform, and who's going to pay for the marketing necessary to drive adoption among both developers and users?
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Phone OSes are hard. Tizen was a big play for it and that ended up being a dud. Windows Phone was also another well-funded competitor that fell on its face.
Really, the problem is that phone manufacturers want to be where the apps are, and app developers barely keep it together making native apps for the two dominant OSes. Another competitor would need to make it really, really easy to make apps performant when ported over with minimal work, because the ugly truth is that no one is going to hire a full third team to develop for another OS that's just starting out.
> "Windows Phone was also another well-funded competitor that fell on its face."
Google had a hand in that, though, by intentionally blocking interoperability with YouTube and other Google services for WP. Even back then they were willing to play dirty to keep their monopoly.
With hundreds of billions of profits on the line this shouldn’t be surprising.
The only thing a business cares about is profits. Everything else is branding.
> Another competitor would need to make it really, really easy to make apps performant when ported over with minimal work
But this is completely impossible, and Google helps make it that way. Their SafetyNet API lets apps verify that the device is running an official, unmodified Android build, and a lot of very popular apps will refuse to run otherwise.
SafetyNet makes it impossible to run most Android apps on Linux using a container-based solution like Anbox.
SafetyNet is also stifling innovation.
Linux/*BSD/macOS can run many Windows apps without emulation via WINE, and those innovations allowed Steam to create potentially billions of dollars in value by making many of their games cross-platform with Proton, and allowed them to create new products like the Steam Deck. SafetyNet precludes ever creating value like that with mobile apps.
Although they use emulation in WSL 2, Microsoft has done something similar with WSL and Linux apps, creating an untold amount of value for not only their platform, but for millions of developers, as well. SafetyNet prevents using something like WSL to run mobile apps on Windows.
For those reasons, you can't build an alternative OS and run many Android apps on them with a compatibility layer, despite apps without SafetyNet working pretty well using compatibility layers like Anbox.
There's no way to fake this? I just looked it up and it seems Magisk is able to fake these attestations somehow. I remember using it to get some mobile games to shut up about my rooted phone. How would rooted devices and custom ROMs work otherwise?
I hate it when these fucking companies use cryptography to control us. Cryptography should be empowering us...
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The manufacturers' hands are tied. People aren't going to buy a phone that they can't run Snapchat and Netflix on.
> The manufacturers' hands are tied.
By "mobile phone companies" I didn't mean mobile phone manufacturers. I meant mobile phone providers like Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. They are the ones who have wormed themselves into the role of gatekeepers for phone purchases (with government help). If phone manufacturers' hands are tied with regard to what they can put on their phones or what app stores their phones can use, they're tied by the phone providers, not by users.
Even if Verizon were to back something like Tizen or Windows Phone, how would that fix the lack-of-apps problem?
I don’t care about running either on my phone.
I have watched YouTube instructional videos, but I can’t see the appeal of watching a movie on a tiny phone screen. As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work.
> As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work.
Absolutely not. Telecommunications applications have extremely strong network effects. There is no jumping ship to whatever works, people will do whatever is necessary to join the network their social circles participate in. In my country it's virtually impossible to communicate without WhatsApp. People buy phones just to run WhatsApp. I've had Signal installed for years and I've not received a single message there, not even from technologically minded friends who really should know better.
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> As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work.
Messaging apps have a network effect. You can't just jump ship from one at will, or you get cut off from all of your friends who didn't jump along with you.
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are you representative of most people?
I certainly wouldn't say I am.
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maybe if there was any other option. It's not like everyone on Android has a million distribution options. It's the most popular OS in the world and there is essentially one company that makes its own rules controlling what gets onto phones.