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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of alternative app stores for Android. Google restricts them, but not severely. Android 12 will lift some important restrictions from alternative app stores.

I'm not trying to portrait Google as innocent, there's still work to be done. But they are absolutely in different leagues with Apple when it comes to user freedom.

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Google allegedly forced Android OEMs to not ship devices with a pre-installed Fortnite / Epic Games Store launcher.

Also forcing users through multiple warning screens and settings until you have finally installed an app might look trivial if you know what you are doing but for everyone else might not be as easy. There are many, many articles about how you should simplify your websites onboarding process to increase the amount of customers so the Android flow is pretty much the anti-thesis to that.

Not only the technical hurdles but also the legal ones need to be significantly lower.

Google has enormous power over phone suppliers and can force them to preinstall their apps and store and nothing else.

While true, they wouldn't be so generous if they were making it on the backend via search. They don't care that much what store the user uses as long as they search on Google. Do they offer any "user freedom" there?

Google does make more money from other revenue sources, but I don't think this is the best example. Chrome (on all platforms) allows the user to set any custom search engine as the default. On the other hand, Safari limits users to four choices: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.

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