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Comment by Irishsteve | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting for GitHub because they have a large developer community who push to these app stores already, so they have the dev audience, just not the consumer.

They charge said developers a few dollars a month per seat. GitHub could somehow instead be taking a 0%-20% cut topline revenue from some of the apps they host.

Lots of work to make that happen the upside might make it worth while.

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The devs are the consumers. So it can be a niche store?

I dont know what a normal person would be doing on github.

What I meant is - GitHub could create a Google Play store. The supply side (Devs) are on GitHub in abundance, so they could have a big catalog.

If GitHub could somehow solve the demand side (Phone users) they'd be sorted.

It's a large pile of open source software. It's able to be redistributed freely, by design. Everyone is in the position to take advantage of the catalog, if they can somehow solve the demand side -- that's what the entire problem of a store is about. F-Droid has been trying for years!

Companies host their private code in private repos.

I’m not saying it’s the best thing for GitHub to do, but...

Let’s say 15% of Android top 1000 apps are sitting in private repos on GitHub. With their build tools GitHub make it possible to automatically push builds to this imaginary store, they offer devs 50% discount on whatever cut google take if on the play store.

You're right, but you don't need to be GitHub for that. Any dev can create an app that integrates with GH, or any other source control service for that matter.

And you can’t see the problem with creating a situation where Microsoft is in direct competition with all the ways you can already deploy this code?

That light at the end of this tunnel is an oncoming train. Not freedom.

Great. I will just have to click on "Fork" to make a scam.

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