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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like there are a range of reasons, but the bigger picture explanation is : Google no longer cares about incentivizing apps to be on the store.

The mobile OS wars are over: every company and dev that wants to do anything is locked into having to provide an Android and iOS app no matter how difficult it is, so all the incentives are for Apple / Google to insulate themselves from risk now by raising the bar on devs.

We need to start exercising the minimal rights / capabilities to ship alternative app stores on these platforms. Easier said than done.

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I dunno, many developers already choose to ignore android entirely because it's less profitable. Raising the bar will only encourage that. At least for me the dox your own address + onerous testing requirements make android extremely unappealing

I guess I could publish on fdroid but why bother? The android platform clearly doesn't care about me.

many developers already choose to ignore android entirely because it's less profitable

source? all I can find by googling around is about the same number of apps with a bias towards playstore.

It's literally in the headline of this post. "Google Play sees 47% decline in apps". Surely they didn't all move to f-droid.

Your claim was: "many developers already choose to ignore android entirely because it's less profitable" so where's the source that "many developers" chose to ignore android ... "because it's less profitable"? Article talks about the effect of google swathing away mass of publishers Google chose not to work with, per article. Also, per article, Google had 3.4m apps and now has 1.8, whereas (also per article) Apple stands at 1.64. So, where's the source to your rather interesting claim since it sounds really interesting and in collision with the article and my search skills for such facts.

It's a widely known phenomenon.

Here's MKBHD bringing in developes to discuss it.

> Why Are There So Many iOS-Only Apps?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x2hQa5heXCU&pp

The biggest take away is that Android development and testing is more work, and Android users are less willing to spend money.

Only in the US. In the rest of the world, Android is king and developers ignore Apple.

Web APIs are also more capable than ever before and can be added as icons on the home page. For an individual developer, you are probably better off just doing a web app.

Android already has many alternative app store. I believe there is nothing currently for paid app (beside OEM store like galaxy store or Huawei) but if there is a need it's absolutely possible to do.

Apple side on the other hand, good luck with that. Even in Europe they made the rules so strict the third party app store are basically dead.

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