Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store

How would the ability to sideload apps force you to install apps outside of the Apple store?

I'm not forced to use FDroid just because I have an Android phone. People aren't arguing that the app store should go away, just that consumers should have a choice.

As an analogy, if I want OEM care for my car, I can get that. It's more expensive, but it offers me strict guarantees about where parts are coming from, and I don't need to worry so much that I'll get substandard care.

The existence of a third-party marketplace doesn't change anything about that situation other than forcing the OEMs to compete more and push their advantages and commitment to quality.

Just look at the PC platform Epic is coming from. It used to be just buying retail boxes, then Steam came along. Now it's Steam, Epic, Origin, Uplay. Personally, I hate keeping track of the separate apps and which games were purchased with each. So I avoid most of them even for games I want to play. Its one of the things that makes me prefer consoles.

The current situation seems more anti-business than anti-consumer (it is both). Pro-consumer would be requiring any purchase be decoupled from that distribution platform.

By that you also give a choice to app makers, some of whom will happily sell you out to bigcorps. Even after switching from appstore to playstore I felt how the latter is less secure than the former. It is unimaginable in the appstore for a gallery app to demand access to your sms and address book. Or that moving items to trash/hiding instead of permanent deletion would require a cloud setup. On android, it seems absolutely normal that even stock apps do that. Calculator may require your geoposition, IR remotes may require the access to your messages. Often it's not just a suggestion, they refuse to work if you do not comply. And that's only the "safe" playstore.

Now imagine that Epic wins the fight, has millions of teens on the fortnite needle and no one to prevent them or some inside bad actor to demand whatever device clearance they want. The same goes for regular apps. I'm sure there are well-intended galleries, calculators and remotes, but they are buried under tons of promoted evil contracts, never seeing neither the light, nor a profit/visibility.

Apple may be a bit greedy with a 30% share, but really acts in interest of its customers by kicking the hell out of arbitrariness.

Privacy-focused mods for Android had demonstrated how to solve this years ago -- give the option to feed the app fake data.

Thanks for the cue, I didn't know that. But I'm afraid that most "stock" users will never use that option. Heck, even knowing it I can't be sure if I want to spend time to research this (there is a word "jailbreak" behind your tip, right?) or just to admit that my switching experiment failed and to go buy yet another iphone instead.

This idea of faking may be the solution against bad actors, but not until apple and google would make that option official. And even then most of naive users will be tricked and burdened into not using it.

> By that you also give a choice to app makers, some of whom will happily sell you out to bigcorps.

No. If the app wants to sell me out to bigcorps, Apple will ban them from the store.

Of course, as a consumer, I'll have the choice to leave the Apple store and follow my favorite apps elsewhere. But if the 3rd-party stores end up with a reputation of being insecure, then consumers will refuse to use them. And everything will be fine.

> Now imagine that Epic wins the fight, has millions of teens on the fortnite needle and no one to prevent them or some inside bad actor to demand whatever device clearance they want.

Then Apple will ban them from the store, and teens will either follow them elsewhere, or they won't.

In theory, this is already possible with Android. But people can't have this argument both ways.

- If jumping ship to Android is easy and available to everyone who owns an Apple device, then clearly having an escape hatch out of Apple's store isn't a big deal and consumers are smart enough to choose whether or not they want to download apps from a secure store.

- If consumers aren't smart enough to choose their own platform based on security, and the cost and difficulty of moving outside of Apple's ecosystem is the only reason why stupid teens aren't being exploited by Fortnite right now, then clearly the "consumers voluntarily choose to stay with Apple" argument is nonsense.

Nobody is talking about forcing Apple to get rid of their store. You will always have the choice to opt into downloading apps only from a secure, strictly managed, curated storefront.

I think it's going to be pretty hard for you to argue that the proliferation of app stores for the PC is bad for consumers.

A lot of people credit Steam (I think justifiably) with kickstarting a huge portion of the modern indie gaming scene -- precisely because they got rid of the crazy rules, agreements, and contracts of the retail boxes, which acted as a massive barrier to entry for game developers. If Steam had never been built, I don't think modern games would be even half as diverse or creative as they are.

Then we move on to storefronts like Humble and GoG, which I think have been hugely influential in pushing DRM-free games as the norm for indies. There are a lot of games that flat-out would not have DRM-free releases if GoG didn't exist. Heck, there are a lot of games that would not run on modern Windows if GoG didn't exist.

Then we move on to Epic's store, which I know gamers hate, but trust me when I say a lot of indie developers are thrilled right now to see someone forcing Steam to lower their splits. Epic has done some serious good for the indie scene. I don't like that they're encouraging exclusives, I think that's bad for gamers. But I'm not going to pretend that as a developer I'm not happy to see someone breaking Steam's stranglehold on the mainstream PC marketplace.

So yeah, there are a lot of PC stores. This has been a massive boon to the industry, there are a lot of excellent games that (I think) would not exist today if not for the diversity of marketplaces. And a lot of these marketplaces fill different niches. GoG focuses on older games, Steam offers mainstream AA titles, Uplay/Origin offer corporate AAA titles, Itch has all the really weird, creative "true-indy" stuff.

No single PC store is expansive enough to cover all of the niches of the entire market.

Even on the console side of things, the diversity of games on the PC has pushed console manufacturers to offer much wider selections of games. Are you happy that basically every indie developer and their dog is releasing their game for the Switch? A big part of that is Nintendo opening up the development process, and they did that because after the Wii U they realized that they needed to pull indie devs away from the PC to stay competitive.

And on PC, what's actually the problem with this? You can basically ignore all of the other platforms and just download your games from Steam. You can opt out of all of the complexity that you dislike.

Sure, you'll miss out on a few exclusives if you do. But you would have missed out on many of those exclusives with a unified storefront anyway, because a lot of those games just wouldn't have been created if there weren't stores that were a good fit for them to sell on. You'll miss out on just as many games if you decide to stick with curated console storefronts.

The big difference is that the platform is completely decoupled from app store.

On Windows, publishers can choose to which store they would publish, and you can choose from where you want to buy it.

On iOS you are completely at the mercy of Apple; not only won't they allow specific apps or content on the store, they seem to make exceptions for some apps/publishers. There is no way to install and use something that Apple doesn't like.

Android is quite different, since it allows to load a different store, like the Amazon one, or FDroid for open source projects (you are still more or less tied to having Google Play Services on the device, since majority of Android apps use it, but the situation is a LOT better than on iOS.)

Excuse my ignorance, but why does there even need to be centralized stores at all? I understand that in the past the primary means of distribution was retail boxes, so studios had to have publishers to at least handle the physical aspect of putting games out in the market. Due to the wide availability of a fast internet connection, the mechanics of a game release is different today, and the primary means of distribution is digital.

Steam and its alternatives brought conveniences to the developers by providing easy advertisement, a streamlined way of delivering patches, an actual digital store to perform transactions, and also more recently started to serve as a major platform for the communities of many games.

I am not a game developer, but I guess that nothing that these stores provide is essential to publish a game and keep it alive, and any developer might simply put a site online, sell the game there, and allow me to pay directly to them. This is probably a niche opinion right now, but given any transaction involving digital goods such as e-books, music, software, games, etc. I am delighted whenever I see the content creator do this.

You may argue that this would limit the discoverability of games by a huge factor compared to them simply being advertised on the front page of some online store, and I agree, but I think if Steam had not grown to be as massive as it is today, that job would simply be delegated to the gaming magazines, forums, and many other independent platforms where the creators would more freely have a chance to promote their content.

> but why does there even need to be centralized stores at all?

Well, discoverability is a big problem. Yes, in theory we could do discoverability a different way, but in practice we haven't built that kind of infrastructure (yet).

There are other problems regarding payment processors and transactions/refunds, tracking where users came from for tax purposes... there's just a lot of infrastructure.

Now, that's not to say we couldn't ever get rid of centralized stores. It would just be a lot of work to build a lot of open infrastructure, get some better payment processors that are easier to sign up for, build the kind of systems and lists you're talking about around discoverability.

I don't think it's impossible to imagine a world with fewer centralized stores and more self-hosted games, and I don't think it's unreasonable to say that world might be nice to live in. I just think that world is far away and that getting there would be a lot of work.

Currently, I can set up an Itch account from scratch and be selling a real game to real people for real money in, like, an hour? Maybe 2? And it'll handle stuff like archiving all of my old versions, and I won't need to set up accounts for my users, and there's a nice integrated blogging platform, and people can comment, and currency conversion is just not an issue. Plus as a user, I don't need to provide my name/address to each developer either, only Itch needs to know where/who I am. So that neatly bypasses the privacy problem of payment systems like Paypal.

Again, none of that is impossible for us to provide in a decentralized way. But the decentralized tools aren't comparable right now; if you want to sell directly it's going to be a lot more work.

Maybe that will change in the future.

>But if the 3rd-party stores end up with a reputation of being insecure, then consumers will refuse to use them. And everything will be fine.

This logic will not work for fortnite users, because you do not expect a knowledge about insecure stores more prevalent among them more than that there is fortnite. You logic works for highly logical and disciplined people, but not for those who want that unique thing that everyone has. Epic simply doesn't care as much as apple/google about a platform sanity, because it is not their net loss in the end. It's the reason very similar to why we ban drugs off the streets. Drugs are fun, but they have heavy strings attached, and much less than everyone realizes that in full detail, while sellers lose nothing.

>You will always have the choice to opt into downloading apps only from a secure, strictly managed, curated storefront.

You seem to have missed the "app-makers" part. If apple to allow more profiting stores, the culture of selling there will grow exponentially and there will be no apps left in appstore beyond few generic and very safe-statused. All custom calculators, galleries and unique apps will be able to demand your AB, geo, etc, because it is even more profit. And they will be listed at the top because more money means more promotion. It is a systematic problem, not just one of a choice.

You might want to check out GoG Galaxy. It has integrations to Steam/Epic/Origin/Uplay/etc and provides a single user interface to manage your purchases across these platforms.

Also, consoles have exclusives too. I choose PC over console anyday.

I really like the idea of a purchase being decoupled from the distribution. GOG(completely) and HumbleBundle (limited extent) seems to be the only option at the moment.

> If apple to allow more profiting stores, the culture of selling there will grow exponentially and there will be no apps left in appstore beyond few generic and very safe-statused.

Then why hasn't this already happened? Are app developers free to abandon iOS and move to Android or not? Why haven't they all done so?

And if developers can't realistically abandon iOS or reject Apple's terms and remain profitable, then doesn't that add a lot of evidence to the idea that Apple is a duopoly with a stranglehold over a significant section of the market?

> this logic will not work for fortnite users, because you do not expect a knowledge about insecure stores more prevalent among them more than that there is fortnite.

Why haven't the Fortnite users all moved to Android so they can install the manipulative apps and games that aren't available on iOS?

If they're free to switch platforms, and they're not smart enough to avoid following bad apps around to lower-quality platforms, then why have they stayed on iOS?

They exist because there is value in what they do:

They put eyeballs in front of games = sales They handle logistics and payment = do game devs want to be a gaming company or a logistics / customer service company? They provide quality vetting, curation and discovery for customers with a reasonable degree of impartiality.

None of these are 'hard' but they take man hours and money to do well.

You seem to prefer giving people less option, because multiple stores are an inconvenience to YOU.

You know what would be a better solution for that? The same one that happens with some applications now on Android: publishing an app in multiple stores. Many apps are simultaneously published in Play Store and other stores.

For example, you could have a game published on the publisher's store. If you buy it there, the price is X. Simultaneously, you could have the same app published on Apple store for $X + 30%.

Then, you let the market decide. Increasing competition is better for consumers.

If you prefer the convenience of buying from just one store, it's OK, you can buy everything from the Apple store, and pay the premium for that. But that would also let the door open for people who want to choose where else to buy their stuff.

> The existence of a third-party marketplace doesn't change anything about that situation

People will install insecure app stores to get a hot app. Facebook would likely launch a store with none of Apple’s spyware restrictions. Cisco and IBM and Microsoft would too, and with that come e.g. employer mandates for certain apps and thus certain stores.

Apple regulates its App Store. Remove its distribution control and that regulatory power diminish. That diminish meant is fine when Apple extends its App Store dominance to win at music streaming and payments. But it’s a poor argument against the App Store per se.

> Facebook would likely launch a store with none of Apple’s spyware restrictions.

Why haven't they done this on Android already? Why aren't my employers currently mandating that I install 3rd-party stores on Android phones?

Most Android users I know have never installed an Android app outside of the official Play store. Why haven't companies taken advantage of them yet?

If you look at the Mac as an example, the vast majority of software is still distributed outside the Mac App Store, usually because either:

- The software is free and the developer doesn't want to pay $99/year to Apple

- The software is paid but the developer either doesn't want to give 30% to Apple, or they want to use a pricing model incompatible with the App Store (discounted upgrade pricing, rolling subscriptions etc.)

- The software does something that violates the guidelines, or in general is incompatible with sandboxing (or would be a worse product because of it)

Because so many applications are not, or in many cases _cannot_ be made available via the Mac App Store, users of said apps are in a sense "forced" to install outside the App Store. I believe that if sideloading was feasible for iOS, many developers (and certainly the big players) would pull out of the App Store completely.

I want to make it very clear though: I don't consider this an argument against sideloading apps at all. I consider it evidence that the App Store (on both iOS and macOS) is woefully inadequate at covering the full range of software developers want to build, and that in turn hurts customers.

I would love to use my iPad for more work related stuff, but I'm a software developer, so most of my day-to-day work involves software that just cannot run on iOS. If sideloading was available I could actually use it like the "Pro" device it claims to be, rather than just a very nice content consumption device.

> How would the ability to sideload apps force you to install apps outside of the Apple store?

The key thing to me is supporting Apple's ecosystem. That ecosystem doesn't come out of nowhere; it's supported by the Apple Tax. If Apple can't collect that tax, they have to either reduce the quality of the ecosystem, or look for revenue elsewhere, like selling your data or obsoleting older models faster.

> The existence of a third-party marketplace doesn't change anything about that situation other than forcing the OEMs to compete more

It changes one other thing, customer experience. Apple believes fewer problems with a device is a better customer experience and with a better experience customers will return time and time again to purchase their products. It's not right for everyone, but I believe that is true for some people.

In order to deliver such an experience, they have to backup their products with exceptional service, and they do a better job at this than most companies. Now, that level of service is not cheap, not to mention most people don't want to deal with support anymore than they have to. So, to make that level of service feasible, they need to reduce the amount of service you need. For that, their solution is to lock the operating system and hardware down very tightly and vet every piece of software that can be loaded on to the phone.

For some people, all of that sounds terrible, and those people will choose not to buy Apple products. For others, it sounds like a carefree experience and they will choose to accept the trade offs for the benefits.

Bringing this full circle to your car example, there is a lot of crossover between these two worlds. Most cars have very good warranties and pretty amazing coverage while you car is under warranty... sounds a lot like Apple. Like your car, there are certain limitations on changes to hardware and software if you don't want to void that warranty. In other words, you are limited as long as you're under warranty.

So, I can appreciate Apple's desire to lock things down... yes, it benefits their bottom line, but I think they also do it for benefits to the consumer. Now, like your car, when the warranty runs out, the OEM service isn't quite so special anymore. The OEM doesn't care what you do at that point because you're on the hook for everything. I think the same should be true for iOS devices -- when the warranty runs out you should be able to request an unlock and then you can sideload whatever you want. If you like Apple's protective measures, you can continue to run in safe mode. Apple would never voluntarily do this of course, because that would increase the value of old phones and potentially deter the purchase of new models. But, it might be a strategy that the feds could pursue.

Because the Play Store is less restrictive.

Why hasn't this happened on Android ? Or has it happened and I'm not aware?

I think as long as sideloading is made inconvenient enough, most consumers won't use it and therefore most developers won't provide it. But it should still be an option for the sake of consumers that want things that the walled garden can't support.

So now we need private companies for regulation? That’s what the law is for. If there is not a good pro-privacy stance on a third party app store, make some damn rules to have privacy enforced like the GDPR or whatever. Don’t let Apple be the law.

A third party App Store doesn’t change any of this. Apple can still collect its tax in their own store. Unless of course that everybody decides to ditch Apple’s App Store, because other App Stores are better. But then you need to ask what the value of the App Store was in the first place.

Discoverability is a big one. There are indies who do have their own stores, and they ask their fans to buy through them, but majority of their sales still come from Steam. There are some indies who are quite open with their numbers you can google around and find the details. Steam sales are also huge for old games.

But even distribution is still an issue. Even indi games today are multiple GB in size. And on the first few days of release (or sales or bundles etc.) you have huge download spikes spikes.

Sure you can put it on aws, but better make sure to read you CDN fineprint so you don't end up with astronomical aws bill. In addition steam out of the box support partial updates,which again you can implement on your own, but that too takes time.

Payment. You can google around for problems indies who tried to roll their own store had. Today you have more options some of them explicitly catering to indies but its still an issue. Aditionaly steam supports charging in foreighen currencies, you can lower price in poorer countries etc.

Additionally steam offers their SDK that includes matchmaking and netwrking and host of other feautures, that are used by a lot of games.

Then there is in game chat, friendliest integration, cheat prevention, cloud saves and steam workshop integration, forums (which suck but are still there and have some auto moderation for spam) ...

Sure you could do all of that on your own, but some of it requires quite a bit of effort.

The new GoG galaxy is wonderful (even though some times it loses my steam integration and I have to log in again), it will make your life so much easier, you can really manage everything from 1 place.

Playnite is another software offering something similar, and is also quite good.

Would you want same in real world also ? Walmart and Costco stores where the company decides what things are best for customer's experience. If you don't want it you can always leave and go to other companies town.

The Apple Tax is that new iPhones cost upwards of $1000.

When I say "tax", I mean it to be an exact analogy: something everyone in a specific domain pays in order to maintain infrastructure.

If these "alternate" app stores help to fund iOS development and maintenance, then they'll have to collect a similar amount of money. If they don't help fund iOS development and maintenance, then of course they'll be able to undercut Apple on cost; but then Apple will have less revenue, meaning they'll have to either reduce spending on iOS development and maintenance and/or look for revenue elsewhere, like forcing you to upgrade or selling your data to advertisers. At which point you have Android.

Or to put it differently: The Apple Tax is not about the value of Apple's App Store; it's about the value of the entire Apple platform.

> The new GoG galaxy is wonderful

GoG Galaxy was a bad idea that undermined GoG almost immediately.

They still market themselves as "GOG.COM, the DRM-free home for a curated selection of games". But there are two forms of DRM they allow.

#1, you can't use multiplayer without providing a registration code.

#2, you can't play the game unless you're running Galaxy in the background.

I have a hard time believing they honestly think "well, DRM is a bad thing in general, but not when we're doing it".

High end phones from most manufacturers cost the same.

How is having to navigate N stores, because all companies want to make more money off you, better for the consumer?

> Then why hasn't this already happened? Are app developers free to abandon iOS and move to Android or not? Why haven't they all done so?

Some of this is due to Apple trying to push for products to be sold for money (up-front, upgrades, subscriptions) rather than being free and advertising supported. Google pushes for apps to be free and advertising based because they are an advertising company.

The second is that android phones may be bought by people who do not intend to use a lot of the smartphone/app features of the device. Apple users tend to go into the store and onto the web more often.

The third being that Apple products tend to attract more profitable demographics of people - people who actually are willing to pay money for things.

These extend outside of the App Store as well, which is one reason why Google pays quite a bit of money to Apple for Google search to be the default search engine of Safari.

If I had to guess I'd say it's that Google's rules aren't nearly as ridiculous as Apple's. For example Apple forbids you from even mentioning that you can sign up to a service externally, let alone linking out to an external payment page.

I completely agree with you though, there should always be an escape hatch.

> I believe that if sideloading was feasible for iOS, many developers (and certainly the big players) would pull out of the App Store completely.

Why do you believe that, when it hasn't happened with the only other comparable platform after years and years of supporting this model?

Windows and Mac are not comparable, as people are not as used to their respective stores, and lots of pre-existing software actually has to go out of its way to integrate with the store, instead of the other way around.

I don't see how consoles fix the issue, aren't they just another choice you have to make? There's three major ones and exclusivity is blocked behind a $400 paywall and having to use entirely different hardware.

The vast majority of games are available just on steam, if having choice bothers you just pick steam or maybe epic (but steam probably has more) and ignore the rest.

This is a bizarre argument to me. Can you imagine if there was only one supermarket brand, or only one department store. Don't you think that might turn out badly?

If it's really DRM that bothers you then the only big option is GOG.

Largely because Apple's restrictions seem to be much stricter than any other store, and lately are rubbing a lot of very big companies the wrong way.

Were sideloading permitted I could see, for example, an Epic App Store, with their 12% cut and lessened restriction on external payment processing, being a popular place for apps to move to.

Because that's how the market works for buying anything.

It's like saying: how is it better to have multiple supermarkets to buy the stuff i want, if they offer the same product at different prices? Well... it's an option, nobody forces you to do it. You can always go to the same place, and know that there's going to be times when you pay more, and times when you pay less.

But you also have the chance to check on other store's offers and buy there if you want.

> How is having to navigate N stores

You don't "have to". In the end, more offer = better for consumers. It's up to each individual person to decide if they want to find better prices or just go to their default place.

I don't think the real world works very well for these metaphors (like the parent's OEM metaphor). What if Walmart required you to generate a username and password, confirm your email, and store your payment info before you shopped? When you wanted to make a cake you had to remember which store you purchased flour or chocolate chips from.

I'm not saying Apple is in the right with how it behaves, but as a user more stores have made things like playing PC games, streaming video, and even PC apps suck more.

These are billion dollar companies fighting each other for their benefit. I'm a bit skeptical about what users get.

Unfortunately no one will start their own store because that is huge investment.

You have the chicken and egg problem there. There are no apps so no users and no one is going to add apps because you don't have users.

Big companies could make their own apps to promote their own shop but let's be honest they would have to put a lot of money to get something good that everyone would use, not just generic crap.

iPhone sales help fund iOS. Apple makes a huge profit. They surely have enough money to sustain iOS by other means. "Poor Apple can’t finance iOS otherwise" is a poor argument.

If a big company (e.g. Facebook) integrated their app store within their main app, there's automatically a massive userbase available - it could potentially even slightly streamline the install process for apps advertised via Facebook.

I suppose this would mean that Facebook app itself would have to be sideloaded, which would probably result in a hit they wouldn't want to take. For a while Amazon had two versions of their app on Android, one in Play store and a second one you could sideload that had their app store integrated. Based on the fact that AFAIK they now only have standalone app store for sideloading, I assume it wasn't a popular option

I don't think Apple is necessarily running out of money...

And it's bit ironic you call it a tax when clearly Apple isn't a big fan of paying taxes themselves. I know, it's not a very good argument but I don't think the stakes are as dire as you make them to be.

They could separate the fee as fee paid for the Apple Store and the fee paid for maintaining the ecosystem. So if you build your own App Store you can avoid paying the Apple Store fee but have to pay the maintenance fee. Which should be reasonable amount, eg 10%. They get so many synergies either way and surely run a great profit in both cases. And if they will get a little less money than currently, boo-hoo.

One difference is (at least with alternate app stores on Android, and I assume it'd hypothetically be the case on iOS), regardless of where you install a mobile app from, it appears on your app drawer/home screen. You don't have to go through a specific launcher for each store/platform as you do with Steam/Origin etc. (I think... been a while since I've used any of them). So in most senses, it may not "matter" where you bought it from (assuming all app stores can do auto-updates or notify you of available updates etc.)

> Which should be reasonable amount, eg 10%. They get so many synergies either way and surely run a great profit in both cases.

If that's true, then someone should be able to raise money for a start-up with the same business model as Apple but charging only at 10% markup; and eventually everyone would go over to them because they get the same thing but for a lower price.

> And it's bit ironic you call it a tax when clearly Apple isn't a big fan of paying taxes themselves. I know, it's not a very good argument but I don't think the stakes are as dire as you make them to be.

I'm not saying Apple aren't often jerks; their "innovation" in tax avoidance harms society and makes the world a worse place. And possibly 30% really is extortionate, jerk-like behavior. But the arguments here about forcing Apple to allow third-party app stores would not only prevent a 30% "extortionate" rate, but would prevent even a more moderate 10% rate.

If there were only 2 physical stores in the US, yeah, I absolutely would want the same thing. I think anyone would.

Imagine if Walmart and Costco were the only two feasible places for most people to buy groceries. Is there anyone who doesn't think that would be a giant problem for both consumers and producers?

> the Apple Tax.

Is that why iPhones are famously cheaper than most other options on the market, and why Apple is constantly launching so many entry-level budget options for lower-income families?

I know you're not the original commenter(s) and I don't want to falsely attribute their arguments to you, but this is all kind of arguing in circles. The things you describe seem to me to be market forces that go beyond, "consumers will just go wherever the apps are."

If Apple users are generally higher spenders, generally more advanced users that buy apps more often -- then that sounds a lot to me like market pressures that will make an official app store attractive even if iOS allows sideloading. In which case, why are people so frightened of sideloading?

If iOS allows third-party stores, all of the same demographic forces you describe will still exist. Consumers will still want to use a store that offers up-front pricing rather than ads, the iOS market will still be filled with power users who buy apps more often, and they'll still want their apps to be included in a user-friendly, secure store.

If those users you describe are attractive enough to force companies to target them now, then they'll still be attractive enough to force companies to target them after third-party app stores are introduced.

I don't know how to reconcile "devs target iOS because of its unique, opinionated user-base who want a secure platform" with "users are dumb and just follow bad apps without thinking". It can't be both -- either Apple users are too dumb to understand security decisions and can't be taught to avoid shady 3rd-party ad-filled stores, or Apple users are smart enough to consciously opt into a locked-down environment and they understand the implications and tradeoffs of that choice. But how can they be both?

It sounds lovely, but it doesn't work out this way.

Companies dont't open their own stores, and sell the games there cheaper than at a competitors store. They only sell it there.

> Companies dont't open their own stores, and sell the games there cheaper than at a competitors store.

Yes they do? Steam, GoG, and Itch don't coordinate their sales with each other. They offer different games at different prices at different times. Even Epic's weekly free game is designed to make people check in on the Epic store regularly instead of just buying those same games immediately on Steam.

There are a ton of PC games that are available in multiple stores, and comparison shopping will often give you different prices.

It doesn't just sound lovely, it's the reality of the PC market right now and you can either take advantage of it if you're willing to comparison shop, or ignore it and buy all of your games on Steam if comparison shopping is too much work for you. It's really not theoretical, it's how the PC market works right now.

Yes, there are some exclusives, but even that is fine, because a lot of the games that are exclusive to stores like GoG, Itch, and even Epic, flat out wouldn't have been made in the first place unless storefronts were competing with each other.

This is something that devs try to get across to gamers occasionally with Epic -- having someone step in and fully fund your game with the only restriction being that it's temporarily exclusive to a store is an unbelievably good deal, and it frees devs up to make more creative, interesting, risky games and passion projects that push boundaries and appeal to more niche audiences.

Not only are a huge portion of PC games not exclusive to specific stores, even where exclusives are concerned competition between different storefronts -- each trying to build the more attractive offering of games -- is still better than having one store owned by one company that only funds a small subset of games. PC gaming is better today than it was when only giant companies like Walmart could distribute games.

The vast majority of games are not store exclusives. And the alternative is not a single mandatory store that magically has everything. There's a lot of apps that would otherwise launch on iPhone but don't because the developers don't want to or can't deal with Apple's fees and restrictions. (See anything that only works on jailbroken devices, or open source projects that only release on Android.)

I have to admit, you've convinced me. I'm not a gamer, so I didn't have much experience with this.

My frame of reference was streaming services, where more platforms meant fever content on each, and having to pay more to watch everything you wanted. But if it is indeed this was with games, maybe multiple appstores could be the way to go.