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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Google could have not been evil by not bastardizing the idea of a package repository.

Apple Store/play is not a new concept. It's a closed off, propriety version of a Linux or BSD package repo or ports tree.

All either company had to do was allow third party repositories. You get a nice list, choose which companies you trust, have a nice interface where you could download an app.repo file, view it's cert and add it to your phone. 90% of people wouldn't use it, but for power uses and beta testers, it would allow a single easy software update system that could be free for all. I wrote about this a while back in a post I did on OSS philosophy:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...

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Isn't this explicitly allowed? Amazon has an app store for android and there's things like F-Droid as well. Also there are many Chinese app stores. If all else fails users can simply sideload the APK.

Not really, Google Play exists in a privileged position on Android phones because it's a system app. Other 'App Stores' are basically glorified downloaders and require a huge amount of manual intervention by the user. 3rd party app stores can't actually install or update applications.

On many Android phones you can legitimately unlock your bootloader and load whatever software you please.

F-Droid does support this fully automatic app installs and updates, see:

https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/Installing_F-Droid_as_a_system...

https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged

If you say "most people won't bother" - that's true, but most people will gladly tick the unknown sources box too for pre-release or pirated apps already.

The Android story is pretty good. As good as it could be, I think, in a reality where 97% of users don't care.

It sounds like you're confusing the App Store and Play Store.

You can still install Gab.ai on any Android phone. You can also use a non-Google app repository with automatic updates, if you want.

> You can also use a non-Google app repository with automatic updates, if you want.

You cannot unless you've rooted your phone. F-Droid as an example cannot actually install or update packages without a system app connector.

But you should just be able to add a 3rd party repository to the Android update system, in the same way you can add a repo to Yum or Zypper or Debian/apt .. or an overlay in Gentoo or OpenBSD.

Amazon's app store can't do automatic background updates unless you're on an Amazon/Fire device. F-droid can (which I just learned from other comments on this thread) but it takes a little extra work to give it that system privilege.

I'm saying you should be able to add a 3rd party repo to the stock Google system, without needed to root or mod the phone. Even for F-droid to do automatic updates, you need to give it special privileges (which I just learned about from another comment in this thread -- honestly didn't think that was actually possible).

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