The #1 thing they provide is exposure.

The vast majority of users simply won’t download and install something they find on a website on their phones.

Agreed, If it wasn’t a forced arrangement I wouldn’t necessarily nave a problem with the price

I suspect you’re just repeating arguments you’ve heard, so don’t take this internet rage personally, but that is complete bullshit.

• Hosting costs nothing. Devs will gladly foot the bill for that if given the option. Even if you distribute your apps on AWS (which is notorious for severely overcharging on egress), your expenses will be no where near 15%-30% of your revenue.

• Payment processing is a competitive field outside the appstores. Even 15%-30% is ludicrous when “overpriced” processors like stripe charge 2%-3%

• APIs are not something sold to developers. They build them as part of the operating system because they have to. That’s how it works. They could try selling licenses, but it would result in devs not building on their fancy new features.

(you didn’t mention the ones below, but people with your argument usually do, so I’m adding them for completeness)

• Security is also bullshit. The Appstore and Play store are FILLED with malware. It is not physically possible to manually review the sheer volume of apps published to those stores. They also are not incentivized to improve the process much, because each time your kid or grandma accidentally activates a $40/week subscription, Apple/Google take a 15%-30% cut.

• Curation/promotion is bullshit. Discoverability on these stores has always been bad, but has been particularly awful since both Apple/Google have started selling search ads in the store. The other day I almost accidentally downloaded a fake ChatGPT app because it was the first result when I searched, it had a very similar icon, “ChatGPT” in the name, 5 stars, and millions of downloads.

These stores also heavily incentivize devs to push subscriptions. I suspect (but haven’t confirmed) that the Appstore and Google Play both rank subscription based apps higher than others, and subs tend to pay a lower revshare fee than other monetization types.

I could go on all day about the rotten dumpster fires that are these disgusting stores. The only people who defend them are fanboys and people who have never actually had to deal with them professionally.

The high price is a result of monopolistic exclusivity.

I personally can’t wait for open sourcing of mobile drivers / driver apis. That will finally allow stuff like turning off phone components for Linux mobile system and not have gyro for some specific phones.

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Wouldn’t putting Android on an iPhone be redundant? It would have less features and capability for a higher cost.

They don’t care.

It’s actually not that hard once you have access. ARM Chips can be difficult to get into, but programming for them is not that hard. The peripherals and other segments might be married components but that should be fine as long as they don’t get swapped out at any point.

Hehe Brussels effect go brrrr

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I think India and Brazil have also made initial efforts.

Back in the old days, Android OS used to be Open Source. You can still get firmware built up from the last release, such as CalyxOS, but in order to install it you have to buy directly from Google with the Bootloader Unlocked as a feature.

Yeah Android is Linux. But Manufactures are limiting it so hard that it is sometimes nearly impossible to get a custom ROM on the phone.

This could be the real “pro” iPhone. Running m3, acting as a phone by itself and throwing a full macOS with Office and Adobe Cloud apps when docked.

So a $1,200 thin client?

That’s also where the Web is now.

People are saying that Flash was bad and HTML5 with heavy JS and all the functionality of modern browsers is good.

Such people are either fine with it, or don’t understand that downsides of Flash (or Java applets, or whatever else) were defined by its advantages, which were much more important.

A lot of kids or young people with no particular interest in IT\CS\engineering would use Flash for animations or little cute things which made their simple, possible back then websites more alive. (I’ve just looked at such one site, abandoned with some trace of a resurrection attempt in 2019, and it’s gorgeous.)

You had to know less to make your own stuff in that old Web than you have to know now.

The Web is by its purpose a networked global hypertext system, a living library with common participation.

That some people want to repurpose it, think they’ve been successful at it, and think others will go along with their wishes, - is sad, but should have no weight.

“Write stuff” and “edit spreadsheets” covers 75% of corporate america.

Yeah, I’ll even go as far as to say that because F-Droid apps are usually not for profit you get actually good apps without ads or trying to sell you anything.

They’re just an app that some dude found they needed and developed, and then made available for everyone else.

This is the most jarring difference I find when I go to the App Store, so a FOSS repository for iOS would be so huge.

And I’m sure of that. Suffice to say it doesn’t matter because Apple’s walled garden allowed the Gov’s invasive app regardless.

Just to be clear: it doesn’t matter because the walled garden sucked and didn’t work and I don’t mind a third party store anymore.

Your first sentence, after the comma, should say “because I was in it…”. That was a bit confusing.

And then you went completely off the rails with some colored light government conspiracy stuff.

So I think that’s causing the downvotes.