Google and Apple have kept a stranglehold on the mobile application distribution market for over a decade now. It's time to break them up, or require them to allow other mobile app distributors on their platforms.
Surely other companies can be more efficient with the 30% cut or less that Google takes, without forcing users to put up with the poor service that's exemplified by the article in the OP.
> Surely other companies can be more efficient with the 30% cut or less that Google takes, without forcing users to put up with the poor service that's exemplified by the article in the OP.
The fact that no other actor has done that speaks to the fact that it's probably not as straightforward as you might think. Go one step further and take any product in killedbygoogle.com and see how many other actors have benefited from recreating and living off a better version of any of those services... I'm curious how you think that breaking down Google or Apple would help us the end users in this case? Surely a smaller company with less assets/employees will spend even less time doing manual reviews for the same amount of apps.
Meanwhile while HN seems focused on gov to put pressure on big tech to break, I keep getting reminders that my family of 5 using video conferencing for school/work is about to hit its monthly data cap of 1.2TB imposed by Comcast in the middle of the pandemic...
How do you suggest they recoup the losses that come with developing and maintaining entire ecosystems of power-efficient operating systems and mobile devices?
Not my problem, Google already makes a ton of money off of me through their mobile ad platforms and tracking, and they can charge the OEMs to use Android. That might even incentivize the much needed competition in the mobile OS market, given Apple and Google's monopoly in that space, too.
How does Apple do it with macOS? What about Microsoft with Windows?
Surely if there was real competition in the mobile app distribution market, we could see how efficient competitors can be with that 15% or less cut compared to Apple.
> and has a really good review process (updates are reviewed by humans within a day or two)
In this very thread, an iOS developer is lamenting the fact that their iOS app has been held in limbo for weeks by Apple reviewers[1]. It's responsible for 100% of their income, and Apple's arbitrary rules and reviewers are cutting into that.
That doesn't instill confidence in me that Apple has a really good review process at all. To me, it shows that we need real competition in the mobile app distribution space.
This is a fairly rose-colored view. The 15% is recent and applies if you meet a list of conditions, and updates often get stuck just as they would on the Play Store.
Surely other companies can be more efficient with the 30% cut or less that Google takes, without forcing users to put up with the poor service that's exemplified by the article in the OP.