One counter-take to this is the web itself: There's no curation or incentive structure to the web, yet it thrives in ways far outpacing the walled garden app stores.

and likewise, 90% of people still converge onto some dozen websites per region anyway. If people really want that "one true platform", they will congregate and make that platform a monopoly. Against their best interests in my experience, but humanity sometimes need to re-learn the same pitfalls every generation.

I think that's a critical piece that anyone opposing a more free and open mobile computing paradigm needs to recognize.

We point to PC gaming as a horrible state of affairs no one in the mobile world wants; but it really isn't. There were a half-dozen storefronts a few years ago. Today: Everyone is on Steam. There's EGS if you play Fortnite. I think Rockstar still has their own stuff, maybe? A couple blizzard games are still only on battle.net. Xbox has their app for Game Pass, but all their games are also on Steam. That's... it. Steam won. Its never not won.

It turns out that markets love centralization. Its an efficiency thing.

Mobile will be the same. Epic will have their store. A few others, maybe. You'll still download all the apps you care about from the App Store. Your user experience won't change (unless you want to give Fortnite a try).

What might change is: It gives a pressure point developers can leverage against Apple to negotiate better terms. Their services revenue will drop... maybe.

I say "maybe" because opening platforms and reducing prices also tends to grow the overall pie. See, there are companies like Netflix who refuse to support Apple IAP for subscriptions because the terms are unfavorable to their business. If those terms became more favorable: 10% of a million is more than 30% of zero. There are companies like Adobe and AutoDesk that refuse to build any meaningful software for the iOS and iPadOS platforms, because (in part) they would be willingly sacrificing the agency of their business to Tim Cook (for 70% of all sales; a penance). With storefront options: You might have to download the Adobe Storefront, but you'd, at least, have After Effects. No one reasonable would pick "not having After Effects" over being given the choice between using After Effects with Adobe's inevitably shit launcher/storefront and not.

But this is already the state of things prior to this ruling. You can install 3rd party stores on Android. They can auto-update their apps just like Play.

The story about pc stores is way off. First there was steam, and for many years it was the only store.

Many launchers came to be, with half assed community features. They didn't want a thriving marketplace, they wanted a piece of the pie. People hated them and they died.

Recently epic store came, with a billion dollar Corp behind, and they are fighting the long battle. The free games are a nice thing (usually older offers or curated indie stuff), but the exclusive business sucks. Luckily it seems unpopular, and fewer brands esnt to adopt it - some are so strong they can do it, but others found out that they can lose their loyal costumers and fade out, eg Borderlands.

I think the key deference here is that the web is open and people can build competitors on a level playing field. They don't have anti-competitive restrictions placed on them by their competitors (i.e. Apple and Google).

You already have the web on your phone. The sensible comparison for the (non-web) mobile app market is to the (non-web) desktop app market, and that's not a clear-cut improvement. I'd guess people currently have more mobile apps than desktop apps, just as you'd expect if the desktop app market were suffering due to lots of garbage/spam/malware from insufficient garden-walling.

> where every app store has the same apps

Can't you buy dyson vacuums at the dyson store, at target, and on amazon?

Personally, this is making android phones a lot more interesting.

dyson doesn't sell third party stuff. If ikea was forced to sell all their chairs at every store, but only for 3 years. are people looking for chairs going to have better options for where to get chairs at the end of the 3 years? I think they'll just be confused and go to their previous buying habits (namely their favorite furniture store or google/epic/samsung app stores). I expect a mess with a lot of unintended consequences, such as conditioning people to think all third party app stores are the exact same, which could harm distribution methods like fdroid (though epic might be happy with that type of outcome)

And what happens at the end of the 3 years? If apps are pulled, are people who downloaded the apps through those alt-stores going to lose access to updates, causing security issues or a support nightmare when the users don't see new features?

We'll see Android users needing to have multiple app stores just to get all the apps they want/need, along with the updates. From a user experience point of view, that sounds worse, even if the competition is meant to make things better.

Are devs going to be forced to support all the app stores too? Will they need to go through N separate registrations, N separate support processes?

I can see a good number of devs going “eeuuuggghhhhh” and just letting an app rot, just only publishing to one store, rules-be damned, or just going to iOS.

Will devs be forced to make accounts on all the stores in order to collect earnings from sales on that store? Are stores opt in or opt out from a developer pov?

Google can’t force them to use Google for payments anymore. Maybe the multiple stores will force developers to integrate their own payment processing that can be used across all the stores, because it won’t be tied to any of them.

Their local store surviving and expanding their operation during these 3 years could be enough of a benefit.

The store can plan for what they'll do 3 years later, so progressively injecting IKEA competitors in the mix and getting people to know the other options could lead to a durable business. Especially if IKEA loses enough sales that they'd want to keep selling their goods in third party stores to keep shelf space from competition.

To get out of the metaphor: if alternative app stores become big enough to thrive on their own from this initiative, app makers will keep pushing their apps other there. In particular this whole scheme assumes some level of compatibility, so the burden should be light enough.

> I don't think we are going to see a healthy competitive marketplace with 4 years of chaos where every app store has the same apps, there's no curation at all or incentive structure for stores to win over app listings, and app stores get created and destroyed at the whims of a random single person.

So what, it's how the music world operates as well. Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube have virtually all that one could ever want to listen (and I'd guess Youtube has the biggest catalog from all the pirates LOL).

I'm all for more mandatory-licensing options, particularly the movie/series space is long overdue for getting a few butts thoroughly kicked - all the streaming sites combined are now more expensive than a cable bill.

I hear you and sort of agree with your general point. Though I think I would love to see the exact same Google Play, but with filtering for apps with ads and IAP. Basically so I could filter for freeware, open source and paid apps.

> I don't think we are going to see a healthy competitive marketplace with 4 years of chaos where every app store has the same apps, there's no curation at all or incentive structure for stores to win over app listings, and app stores get created and destroyed at the whims of a random single person.

The horrors of free will and choice.