all you need to do is look at the windows ecosystem vs the linux one to realize how important a software hub is. windows is a place where people download random one off pieces of software that may or may not be safe, will likely never be updated, and will sit and rot on your computer until the end of time, and are entirely unvetted whereas linux maintains all of your software for you, keeps it frequently up to date, manages dependencies and does at least SOME level of vetting. there definitely are problems with current implementations of app stores in phones, but the idea in general has been a huge boon for security and maintainability. if you think that android would be better off without google play you are insane. people would be running insecure nonsense that would be doing stuff like stealing their bank information and all sorts of stuff.
if your problem is the fact that apple restricts people's ability to run software that they haven't explicitly allowed, then I agree, that is a problem. that isn't a problem on google as you can install any apk you want.
This argument really doesn't resonate with me. Like, if people want to download trash on their Windows computer, who am I to stop them? You can do that on your Mac and Linux devices too. People don't need to be protected by App Stores.
I'm not only concerned about that, though. The standard 30% cut of revenue flowing through the app if it was downloaded from the app store is also an issue.
In general, App Stores create a 'marketplace' where one doesn't need to exist. That it's the default method of getting software isn't really a benefit because it makes self-distribution harder (or impossible - which is really the anticompetitive issue here).
> Like, if people want to download trash on their Windows computer, who am I to stop them?
I think that attitude was fine pre-internet, but these days we are all sharing a network and there's an analogy that can be drawn with public health policies. App stores are one small part of the strategy to help reduce the number of machines that end up as part of a bot net or other similar uses.
Seatbelt laws are not the analogy I would use. It's direct physical bodily harm vs some unknown and unquantifiable risk when installing a 3rd party app.
We got by just fine in the 80s and 90s without App stores. So much innovation came out of that world which established the dominant players who are in control now.
And you don't even get security with App stores. As we already know with all the malware found in Google Play apps.
App stores are simply keeping the big guys big and small guys small with few exceptions here and there.
It's just another walled garden that keeps the little guy out and keeps players like Google and Apple entrenched.
i agree that you should be able to do whatever you want with you device. if you want to download malware or try to manage it all yourself, then you should be able to do that. i think that out of the box, by default, having things managed by a package manager makes sense, especially for normies. this app store monopoly doesn't exist on android. you can very easily install fdroid or any other app store whenever you want. this issue does exist on ios though. if you would want to argue that alternative app stores or package managers should be front and center out of the box, I'd be more than fine with that as well.
> this app store monopoly doesn't exist on android. you can very easily install fdroid or any other app store whenever you want.
This isn't true. Other app stores cannot compete with the Play Store on feature parity due to limitations Google put in Android. For example, F-Droid cannot implement background installation of apps, batch installations, or automatic upgrading without first having root.
I tend to agree. An app store isn’t a prerequisite for the operating system sandboxing apps from each other, managing permissions, and providing a consistent installation and update experience. It’s only a prerquisite for anti-competitive behavior by phone/OS vendors.
This is exactly the reason app stores should be banished! I want explicit control over my software and I don't want it to update without my explicit consent. There's a trend recently in desktop software to remove features / settings in favor of a simplified mobile-first design, and too often a version from 5 years ago is better than today's.
I want to keep my software forever. Due to hardware improvements, my copy of Photoshop CS4 works even better now than it did 12 years ago when I bought it. You'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands if you want me to switch over to an Adobe CC subscription.
I think it's easy enough to imagine implementations that allow the addition of software vendors to the package system that permits regular updates. Many of the Linux package managers (e.g., Apt, Portage) permit this; for example, on Gentoo, I install Steam by adding Valve (/Steam) as a place that the package manager can obtain packages from.
That's not to say Apt/Portage are by any means perfect; the nature of how they are configured is definitely not going to be friendly to your typical Windows user. But I think it is possible to wrap that in a UI that adequately expresses "okay, you're adding the ability to install software from this vendor, and [the package manager] will help keep it patched & up-to-date."
I think we also need to combine that with better security models, so that desktop software isn't necessarily granted access to everything by default.
But UI design trends have spent the last decade "simplifying" UIs down so much that they fail to solve the problem at hand.
As long as sandboxing between apps remains, it doesn't matter if you download random crapware. They may do bad things while you are using the app but the damage is limited to what you type in to the app itself rather than on windows where programs have access to everything.
> windows is a place where people download random one off pieces of software that may or may not be safe, will likely never be updated, and will sit and rot on your computer until the end of time, and are entirely unvetted
We should tell all the people who have been using Windows for two decades about this.
> whereas linux maintains all of your software for you, keeps it frequently up to date, manages dependencies and does at least SOME level of vetting.
First of all, what vetting? Anyone can become a package maintainer. They then do a package update, but nobody is verifying that they did it correctly. Anyone can sneak a backdoor into a new release of a package. And any hacker can backdoor the source code before it gets packaged. This has happened many times.
Also, the distro often does not keep it up to date. Debian has probably been the worst offender here. Its software is often so ridiculously out of date that you have to use some crappy bleeding-edge release to get a recent version of some software. Or users end up piping an http get into a bash shell as root, which is a super idea.
Finally: dep management? Really? The one thing everyone on Linux bitches about and is always creating some new hokey package manager to solve?
> there definitely are problems with current implementations of app stores in phones, but the idea in general has been a huge boon for security and maintainability.
"This week Google removed 17 Android applications from the official Play Store. According to Viral Gandhi, a security researcher from Zscaler, all 17 applications were infected with Joker (aka Bread). Malware on the Play Store is a common phenomenon and it is a collective duty of both Google and users to deal with them."https://www.gizchina.com/2020/11/02/malware-found-in-the-goo...
> if you think that android would be better off without google play you are insane. people would be running insecure nonsense that would be doing stuff like stealing their bank information and all sorts of stuff.
Good thing that never happens on Android, as long as people have the Google Play Store.
Newly Found Malware can steal bank details on Android phones (https://www.hackread.com/malware-can-steal-bank-details-andr...) - "Flash player does not come from the protected Google Play Store but rather from bogus websites and messages which trick the users into installing them in their devices. Websites that the malware usually exists on include adobeplayerdownload.com, adobeflashplaayer.com, and flashplayeerupdate.com."
if your problem is the fact that apple restricts people's ability to run software that they haven't explicitly allowed, then I agree, that is a problem. that isn't a problem on google as you can install any apk you want.