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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Another interesting thing this could do is get some momentum behind alternative app stores on Android. They exist but they're not popular. But suppose some of the big names who are tired of Google's fees go together, choose one and put all their apps there instead. That could be enough to get people to start using it. At which point, if it was charging e.g. 5% instead of 30%, many other apps would move there too.

It could be the best thing to happen in this space for a while.

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Would it even matter? Google has tied so much critical functionality into their Play API that they could probably just flip a switch, and any app that didn't go through their own store would lose huge amounts of capabilities that Google has locked up.

This is a fine - even advantageous - for open stores like F-Droid, as the target market is users who explicitly don't want more Google spyware on their phone. But for large software companies pushing out profitable apps that require Play apis, it wouldn't be feasible.

Other stores aren't allowed to auto update apps which is a pretty big disadvantage.

If you want the alternative app stores to become more popular like you say, there's no better place to actually name some of them than in the comment you just made.

A lot of the 'alternative' app stores are either for piracy or for heavily fringe content (think NSFW) or open source only like F-droid. There are also app stores that are region specific e.g. east asia or Russian-speaking. It is difficult to find international, mainstream general purpose app stores.

That's because Google made it so third party app stores can't install apps in the background, auto-upgrade or batch install multiple apps.

Users expect to be able to do that, so it is a non-starter to run a commercial app store that Google's already turned into a second class citizen on Android.

I think if there was truly a great alternative store, these features would not block it’s initial success.

I think it is impossible to have a "truly great alternative" app store that doesn't include basic functionality that all the competing App Stores have, and Linux has had for decades.

Surely other app stores should be able to compete on an even playing field with Google, and be allowed to implement background installation, auto-upgrading and batch installation of apps.

You can include such features if you are an OEM vendor e.g. Samsung can install their own app store as root and give access to all the above features.

They do and it's quite popular. That's the reason fortnite is still avaliable to all Samsung users.

Why bother when you can just install apks directly?

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