shimfish

Anecdata: I've pushed out dozens of small code fixes to My PlayHome Plus over the past month and none of them took more than a few hours to be reviewed.

As an app developer, I'm looking forward to having to answer all the emails asking for me to transfer their purchases to Google Play.

Which is another non-discussed aspect to this.

People are already upset that their digital purchases are controlled by Apple. Wait until the startup that they bought stacks of software from goes bust and all of their app purchases are gone.

So why are we doing this then?

And these services would all take a 15-30% cut. It wouldn't be profitable otherwise.

I still end up with one more app store to deal with. Unless this 3rd party becomes a de-facto monopoly, there's no way you could afford to leave money on the table by not also dealing with Apple and Google.

It becomes everyones user experience when every big company only offers their software on their own app store so they don't have to pay anyone else a cut.

Oh goody. I get to manage my own payment system. And have to worry about being tax compliant in every country and state. And deal with logins, and refunds and fraud and uptime and customer support.

Where do I sign up?

So you're suggesting that either Google or Apple will just step aside?

And the point of this monopoly busting legislation was to create a bigger monopoly?

As an indie dev, I'm really not getting this.

Android has had alternate app stores for years. I don't recall any of them being a panacea for poor struggling devs held captive by Google Play. I stopped offering my apps on any of them as it was never worth the bother.

What problem is this trying to solve for who exactly? I don't see any way this ends up as a win for small devs.

That's not it.

We buy puppet Yoda as being real (or at least suspend disbelief) in a way we simply can't do with CGI Yoda.