Not to editorialize, but I think this is kind of a crazy article. Sharing for the laughs and the discussuon.
Opening a walled community is always good for the end users. Promoting competition is always good for the end users.
There’s always been alternative app stores and sideloading on Android. The only thing this really opens up is a lot more companies could end up with your payment info and I’m definitely not a fan of apks that will now be allowed to force update themselves in the background. That’s a terrible idea. So would having to update apks from dozens of different sources.
I disagree, I preferred when all the shows and movies were on netflix, and I like that all of my games are on Steam. Opening the market creates exclusives, which are bad imho
Mate. Trusting a company not to shaft you when you have no alternatives is never a good idea. It is actually really bad.
Companies do not act towards the benefit of the customer. It is always towards a better bottom line, and those decisions many times do not have your best interest at heart. If you have no choices, the companies have no incentive to make your experience any better. (see Internet Explorer). Competition is always a good thing. It forces companies to be better. The key word there is forces because they will not do it on their own.
Sadly, often when you appear to have choices, you still don’t have a choice. The type of competition that practically benefits users rarely exists and profit-maximizing businesses actively work to reduce or eliminate it. In the long run competition in a market disappears via consolidation - the act of the winners acquiring the losers. And so you end up dealing with one or several companies, whether you trust them or not.
With that said, the author of the article is obviously out of their mind or an active Google shill.
It’s unfortunately not happy days and rainbows in “competition land” either though. It usually just leads to a race to the bottom in the pursuit of infinite profit growth, forcing them to lower quality in a never ending downwards spiral, leaving the customer with shit on all sides.
You disappoint Paul McGann. Netflix never had all the shows or movies. There was a time when they were the only game in town. But even that is being viewed through heavily nostalgia by you. And not in any way. Objectively.
There’s no reason we could not have a standard interface and way of content delivery with multiple stores as a back end. The problem isn’t the stores and the stores are not ultimately used to blame for exclusives. That is all on the rights holders. It is well within the right holders. Ability to reject exclusivity.
As opposed to everything being exclusive to one platform, like you seem to prefer???
Well I mean, you’d only have to get that one account then. Not 20 different ones. Easy peasy. However, that platform must then be extraordinary benevolent and pretty much non-profit for that to end well.
I understand his point though. It should be Netflix with every show vs Hulu with every show vs Max with every show. So the competition is on distribution quality and price, not content.
In the 1930’s studios owned the movie theaters so you could only watch a 20th Century Fox movie at a 20th Century theatre. Vertical integration of content with distribution was made illegal. But of course tech companies ignored the law based on the premise that doing an illegal action with a computer isn’t illegal because the law against vertical monopolies didn’t technically say “streaming service” in 1940.
Several years ago, the law was repealed and Disney+ launched a few months later. This started the rush of vertical monopolies of content with distribution that we live with today.
The issue is the platforms aren’t competing, because shows can exclusively be on one platform only and you need to be subscribed to watch it, so you end up with the current landscape of services that instead of competing with each other make it so you need all of them to get a full experience. Alternative playstores might face similar issues, but you don’t need to pay to download multiple stores and apps don’t have exclusivity deals to one app store
This just feels like fear mongering. Oh no Google says it can’t protect us anymore. Whatever shall we do?
In theory malicious android apps. In practice they create locked ecosystems that are hard for anyone to break in. No one wants another apple model.
“If anything, the toggle made me feel like I was engaging in something truly indulgent, and that appealed to my desire to pretend I’m Angelina Jolie’s character in Hackers”
…opening the settings makes them feel like a hacker?
At this point I think people have been babied about technology long enough. It’s time people learned just a little bit about how to handle technology so that it doesn’t look like voodoo black magic anytime you do something more basic than opening YouTube and getting cat videos.
Just in: Google whines about regulations made to break up its monopoly.
Regulations set in place because they are unable to regulate themselves.
News at 11
It seems to read an article from an alternate universe. Neo store and droidify can already automatically update third party apps from years ago, just give the permission once per app.
Don’t like the automatic update? Disable it in the setting pretending to be Angelina Jolie’s character in Hackers. The third party app store didn’t allow to disable automatic updates? Just uninstall it and get a new one.
For example, when neo store forced the user to give the permission to stay always loaded in memory to check for updates all the time, first I checked GitHub to see if it was a bug. When I saw it was a deliberate choice from the dev and that they were unwilling to reverse it, I just uninstalled and move on. There’s choice.
Freemium games would never redirect the user to their website for saving some fees because:
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Friction. As a play store IAP a whale can buy $50 in useless game coins with just a scan of the fingerprint. Otherise open the browser, create an account, type billing address, type cc numbers, get the otp… insane bounce rate that’s higher than the fees
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Chargebacks. Nobody does chargebacks against Google because they would nuke your Google account for fraud and that is a disaster. But a chargeback on an idle clicker where you’re already bored that bears no conseguences? Oh yes!
