Comment by lucideer
3 months ago
> This is really bad. I think that most people on HN will agree with that.
I may prove to be wrong but I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out & genuinely think it could be good, holistically.
There's a number of possibilities:
1. This drives most people to Apple & Android dies. iOS is mostly a better product than Android, with the exception that Android is semi-open. This removes Android's only competitive advantage.
2. This drives most people to Apple which motivates Google to do a U-turn.
3. This drives people to Graphene in such large numbers that it gets financial support, & some banks are pressurised into dropping Play Protect requirements.
I honestly don't know which of these 3 is most or least likely but all move us away from the current stagnant position of Google being the best reasonable option of a set of very bad options. A complete Apple monopoly would obviously be bad in the short term but would at least leave an opening for fresh competitors.
4. The majority of users don't know or care what sideloading is, so this has a marginal effect on userbase
You're right of course, most users don't know or care. If they did, iOS wouldn't have a 61% share of the US market.
But the % of the total market that do care is not an insignificant % of the total Android userbase. There's also a spectrum of concern - I'm a long time Android user turned iOS user: I care deeply about sideloading but ultimately the balance of pros & cons shifted for me, & I suspect will begin to for others.