Why can't we solve the app store monopoly problem?

> Why hasn't there been enough innovation in terms of creating alternatives despite a healthy improvement of web application distribution like PWAs(Progressive Web Apps)

This is because those who think these solutions will change things have no idea where the problem is coming from. Basically they are solving the wrong problem. They must first sit down and think hard about why it is that Apple and Google have so much power. It's because they have built products people can't live without on a daily basis (Android and iPhone)

PWA won't get you anywhere because at the end of the day your success is still at the mercy of those platform providers. Currently Google and Apple just let them be because they're just cute experiments that don't threaten their business model. But when it does become threatening, they may easily shut down access to PWAs overnight and there's nothing we can do about it other than bitching on public forums like HN.

The point is, if you want to beat Google or Apple you need to start from a platform that doesn't rely on them at all. PWA completely fails there.

> Some interesting innovation might be Dapps inside the Coinbase Wallet or Status IM. What are some reasons it is futile to take on this marketplace.

For the same reason, this "DAPP" is even sillier. Unless these "DAPP" guys are going to build their own device, at the end of the day they still rely on iOS and Android for their users to interact with their "Decentralized" app. What a joke.

The solution is not about building a "decentralized app store" or "fight against Apple and Google". It's about building something that comes out of nowhere and disrupts the current status quo in ways never expected. No other way around it.

Google services are a huge drain on the battery. Have ou ever tried to degoogle your phone? Such an amazing increase in battery life [1].

My stock android (samsung) was like having a parasite running on your hardware that eats your battery and maybe also tracks what you're doing all the time.

I wish there was another OS like what Linux is to Windows and Apple that had atleast the few basic apps like Uber, Youtube, etc. It is really the need of the hour

[1] https://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-m30s/how-to/guide-de...

Lack of support for antitrust. People are still enjoying massive corporate profit margins and S&P500 gains. Literally the entire pensions system depends on super high profit margins.

This is by no means unique to our times and tech. Happened many times in the past.

PS. When was the last time that Wilshire 5000 actually had 5000 companies in it? Google tells me it was in Dec 2005.

If you’re saying why we don’t have multiple app stores run by multiple people and even self hosted apps then I can help add an answer.

It was exactly like this before Android and iPhone. I had a Nokia E71 and before that a Sony Walkman phone. They could run J2ME apps and games and you could download from a site called getjar.com and others. Nokia Symbian could run more powerful native apps - I wrote one myself.

They all sucked. Most of the apps were full of malware and you never knew which one would lock up your phone, infect your phone, or upload all your data to somewhere.

AppStore and Playstore exist for the same reason that CA certificates exist - most people are good but some are terrible and they damage the ecosystem. For CA we have LetsEncrypt now. But phones are way more complex than that. Most of the phone stack is thankless but highly specialized work - you won’t get that for free in volume anytime soon.

It’s more complicated because people expect the latest phones. Older generation mobile technology is worthless right now. Cutting edge technology needs investment and has substantial market. This market is also winner takes all. There is maybe place for 3 players but not anymore in an efficient, commodity market that’s also capex heavy.

Either government has to intervene and make the marketplace competitive, or we'll have to spend a decade or more routing around the app duopoly.

I used to think we could build a new platform in a sandbox on top of the old platforms (like a browser), but the duopoly has gotten so confidently aggressive that they'll squash out of existence any new platform before it has a chance to grow.

I actually thought Expo (the React Native runtime) had a chance to do this "platform on a platform" thing, but Apple wouldn't even allow their debug tool to exist once they realized you could preview apps by plugging a URL into their runtime client, and that those apps were actually good.

So yeah: government intervention, or a few decades of lost progress and value creation. Thankfully for those of us still living in a democracy, we get some choice in the matter.

Because the same people who make the devices also run the app store. Therefore they get to stay 'No other app stores allowed' on our devices and OS.

Isn't this extremely obvious?

Ironically it was Steve Jobs who announced No SDK web apps as primary model for app delivery in iPhone and later when he realised it could mint money; native apps via App store became de facto.

Initial set of iPhone app developers made a whole lot of money from App store, if not money they scaled their business to new heights - Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat etc. Since android was late to catch up in the developed economy, Apple got away with its ridiculous monopolistic practices with Appstore.

But now times have changed, people care more about apps than the platform they run on e.g. Spotify. WhatsApp on KaiOS on a single device in a single country(albeit large population) made that OS a significant player in the smartphone ecosystem - a feat which even Microsoft failed to achieve; that explains the importance of apps over the platform currently.

I think Apple might showcase the support for PWA in Safari as a way to defend its anti-trust litigations in the future. Although I personally want the PWA to succeed as it's the only way pure Linux smartphone ecosystem could capture market i.e. it's more important to break the smartphone duopoly than to break the app store monopoly (IMO), for security and sanity of mobile computing.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_application#Ba...

The App-Store was a huge improvement over existing distribution at the time.

30% wasn't super generous but it was much better than anything else, and Apple was a kind of underdog in the mobile market, at first.

Today, things are different, we have a duopoly, in practice that's the same as a litteral monopoly.

Antitrust laws should apply, but it will take time, a lot of time, big corporations have huge lobbying power.

Because it's expensive and difficult to directly compete with trillion dollar companies?

That's why we have a government, because when companies get big enough, that's the only entity left that can restore the balance of power.

Since we're living in a corporatocracy, it has become unclear which corporate abuse gets a slap on the wrist and when, because there are so many. It's become profitable to do what you want now, ask for forgiveness later. It turns out you can even ruin the world's economy and instead of getting punished, receive a bail-out and your usual hefty bonuses!

I can only assume these decisions get made behind closed doors by groups of politicians and multi-national corporations. When a consensus gets reached, they announce it to the public, not unlike when crime syndicates get together with the police and give them a few sacrificial lambs, to continue business as usual.

The only real solution to this problem is to completely reverse-engineer the iPhone and iPad down to the level of the ISA and device drivers and load a free operating system.

And no the ISA is not ARM. It resembles ARM but it contains secret Apple sauce. And there's lots of crypto chip voodoo going on; we'd also have to figure out how to disable all that.

In any case the requisite reverse engineering could be done with enough money. It's not a technical problem. But it definitely is a money problem: I don't know how to make a good enough business case for offering IOS device owners a completely alternative OS because most of the muggles just don't care.

Because we keep buying devices locked into app stores, and we tell ourselves that is A Good Thing for security.

I have an android device and never considered a third party app store. It is hard enough to trust most apps in the approved store, let alone a stranger's. At best, I go straight to the content owner and use their website.

Sandstorm tried something like this, but never took off because most people- producers and consumers alike- don't find them more helpful than what already exists.

It would help to look at the situation of the Android marketplace in China. As we all know Google Play Store isn't available in China, so has app distribution been decentralized and innovative in China? Is there a benefit?

The answer is of course no. You have the same Chinese Big Tech dominating, like Tencent or Qihoo. You have tech companies that have nothing to do with apps, but make app stores nonetheless just because they can. You still have app stores operated by carriers (China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom). And then you have small app stores that struggle to survive, and even then usually resorting to unscrupulous measures that would be utterly unacceptable elsewhere.

Does this approach of multiple app stores benefit app developers? I don't think so. Developers would rather have one single store and their rules and requirements to deal with. So much so that there are now intermediaries in China whose job is to get apps distributed on multiple stores so that developers don't have to worry about it. It's just become another middleman that eats into the profits. Or they decide app distribution is so difficult that they make their app a simple web view wrapper, and lose many benefits of a native app like tighter integration with the rest of the system.

Does this help consumers? I'm afraid not either. Do you really want consumers to remember which store they downloaded an app from? Not to mention app stores overwriting apps downloaded by other app stores, a dark pattern to boost their own numbers, or an app store forcibly silencing the update notification from a competing app store, etc.

So what are the innovations you are expecting?

This is the point of view of a marketer that thinks that the solution should be to regulate ALL MARKETPLACES, or to require an independent entity to be the referee/regulator.

I think most people disregard what conditioning does to human behavior.

Conditioning takes a long time and consistency, and you have OS's that funneled users during YEARS of usage to use what they provided as a way to find and install applications.

Apple is an extreme of enforcing the App store, but for Android you could install other appstores/distributors, hell manufacturers tried this (Samsung, Huawei, and many others) to bring their proprietary solutions. Yet it didn't scratch the Playstore marketshare. Why is that? I think it's because for a long time, the Playstore was the only solution and that was just enough time to be established for users as well as developers.

Why, on the other hand, for Windows people don't gravitate towards windows store?

Here I think it's because windows had apps for their OS being sold from shelves on shops, given away as demos on magazines, to .exe files you could download from the web, or that could be transfered by your neighbor via Floppy/CD/USB Stick. People are used to look for Windows Apps in a plethora of distribution channels. Hell people still factored the possibility of having virus on the apps according to the distribution channel.

If you look at MacOS, people are conditioned to look at one place - and it doesn't take too long of usage to achieve this.

People are lazy, in a good way. We want the most effective way to achieve our goals, with the right conditioning it becomes extremely hard to shift.

We need to build our own phones, and run whatever OS we want on them. Why isn't it easier to build your own smartphone?

I do NOT want to go back to the chaos of pre-App Store world where you had to visit NN different websites to get your software, multiplied for every machine, then revisiting them regularly for updates or putting up with noise from N different update mechanisms.

PWAs still have a long way to go before they're fully viable replacements for apps. Even on Android, which supports them vastly better than iOS, they're still lackluster. This is partially on the shoulders of mobile OS/browser vendors, but I think there's also an unavoidable ceiling to what current web architecture can do in terms of UX.

Front end web architecture is going to have to undergo a more radical evolution before native apps can reasonably be displaced. React and family were the first step of that, and I would guess the next step is building something like it into browsers themselves.

The app stores work incredibly well for the overwhelming majority of users.

A political answer would be for governments to take action.

Since the Euro zone is lucky enough not to have an app store in it, they might be able to force Apple to open up the app store, maybe even publish the information and tools to develop iOS software without a Mac.

Another answer is to develop web applications instead of apps. Almost always we get pestered to first use the app, second use the mobile web site, third use the desktop web site, but usually the quality of the user experience is the other way around.

Everyone is free to innovate and create alternatives. Go ahead -- go out and build something that people want and is a platform that people are willing to / want to develop on, and can be charged fewer fees (or no fees at all).

An app store is not a public utility or place of public accommodation that entitles people to a certain kind or level of access. Or a right to sue, claiming that a certain price is fair.

Feel free to make something newer and better.

It's the fundamental economics of platforms. At the same time that they are very democratic, they are also very monopolistic. It's weird and not something you should analyse without undoing your intuition about companies. The economics is very different.

Book recommendation: Modern Monopolies by Alex Moazed

Everyone seems upset (publicly, though I suspect it has been kept private for a long time) right now about the App Store’s commissions on sales. How does this differ From, and why isn’t there an equal level of outrage over, the “service fees” that AirBNB or Uber charge?

You literally can't sideload any app on an iPhone and Apple will never relent on that unless they're compelled by law. So either you get people to stop buying iPhones or lawmakers to admit that's a problem, and neither is likely to happen nowadays.

There's an easy way to solve the monopoly problem. Redefine app stores as utilities.

The problem is cost of entry into the market with diminishing returns.

What we have is not a technology problem. The problem is that what you build is worthless unless you get people to adopt it. And right now, that requires:

* Building a phone/piece of hardware that can run apps and replace the iPhone/android phones * Investing in a marketing campaign to get your hardware into the mainstream, so people will buy your phone instead of an android or iphone. * Convincing companies and app makes to build for your new hardware.

That breaks down to a tremendous amount of R&D, building a cloud network that can rival Google's and Apple's cloud systems, convincing app makers to build for a platform despite it not having any users, and convincing users to buy into your platform despite not having any apps.

It's tremendously expensive.

It was a worthwhile expense for Apple: they literally invented the new ecosystem and were the only option at the start. Their return was guaranteed.

It was a worthwhile expense for Google: they already had the cloud services, were a household name, operated arguably the largest ad network to market their new platform, and had plenty of cash on hand to get things moving fast. They may not have been able to match Apple's competition-less returns, but had a low cost to entry and even half of the pie is great value.

For any new competitor, having to share the pie with Apple and Google limits the potential return. Couple that limit with having huge expenses to build out a competing product and getting people to use it, and it's not a very appealing investment. At best, you get what's left after Google's and Apple's shares. At worst, you spend millions (billions?) for nothing. We've already seen the Windows Phone and the Fire Phone fail to enter, and if giants like Microsoft and Amazon deemed it not worth their while, who will?

So that's where we are now. So long as the masses use Apple and Google products, they will continue to default to those app stores. And it doesn't make financial sense for anyone to enter the market and compete with them (with any significance, at least).

I could see some very niche phones/tools coming into play, but with very limited functionality and only a narrow user base that actively seeks that niche. Eg. security-seeking engineers. Someone could make a phone with very limited features (at least, "native" functionality ala gmail) and see success with an audience seeking that subset, but it wouldn't be a mainstream option.

Why did Ubuntu for mobile fail? Feels like that's the kind of thing we need

Noticed toady, you cant even download firefox on android without a app store.