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Building business that solely relies on constant mercy of someone else's platform is an extremely risky endeavor to begin with.
by gesman 8y ago
Building business that solely relies on constant mercy of someone else's platform is an extremely risky endeavor to begin with.
- Barrin92 8y agoAnd virtually unavoidable in the smartphone app space because of the gatekeeping function of the stores. I don't know exactly how we got here given that nobody would have accepted this sort of curation on a desktop, but we somehow just walked into it on our phones.
- wvenable 8y agoYou have to get there from the start; the app store has to be there from day one. Since that didn't happen on the desktop, it's pretty hard to retroactively introduce one (although Microsoft is trying hard).
- omegabravo 8y agoWhich major operating system doesn't have an app store equivalent?
- simonh 8y agoThats being pretty pedantic. Introduce one successfully is a pretty obvious implication. Even after almost a decade of desktop app stores they’re still really struggling to get user acceptance outside a few niches. In fact the only one I’d count as an actual commercial success is Steam.
- omegabravo 8y agoindeed, my mistake I misunderstood the post
- simonh 8y agoClassy, +1
- tommymachine 8y agoAnd arguably far more necessary. We have our phones turned on and with us almost 100% of the time we are alive. They can track our locations and hear everything we say. It's more important to control what apps can have access to with smartphones than it was on any prior platform.
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y agoYeah, a difference between my phone and my laptop is that my phone needs to basically be an appliance: it needs to work consistently in all sorts of situations so I don’t get stranded somewhere in an emergency. For this purpose, having a really strict gatekeeper that limits what apps can do is a feature, not a bug.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- leppr 8y agoAnd yet open source solutions seem way less popular on mobile than their desktop equivalents. Seems more like a justification for passive acceptance to me.
- r_c_a_d 8y agoMy phone is on and with me for less than 50% of the time. Just saying; phones are not as important to everyone as you think. (yes, I am over 40)
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoGood for you. Unfortunately, your personal habits aren't really relevant to the global impact of these policies.
- scarface74 8y agoI'm sure you probably "haven't owned a TV in 10 years" and wonder "do people still watch TV". Yes that was a popular post on Slashdot years ago.
- tomc1985 8y agoWe got here rather simply... Apple introduced the iPhone with no apps at all, then gave a half-assed open solution (bookmarks on your home screen, essentially), then they introduced the App Store, with their rules. Since there was no other way to get apps on the phone (short of jailbreaking), App Store won and Play Store was built in this model. Other smartphones in this space at the time (Windows Mobile and Blackberry) didn't quite capture the imaginations like Apple did. WM was fairly easy to sideload apps to; not sure about Blackberry.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoUnless they've changed it recently, you can install anything you want on an Android phone. You just have to change a setting to allow apps from unknown sources. It takes a few seconds. I believe this is still the only way to get the Humble Bundle app/game installer on your phone. https://www.humblebundle.com/app https://www.humblebundle.com/app
- wilsonnb3 8y agoNot to mention you can download other app stores to your device if you wish, including Amazon's and FDroid.
- tomc1985 8y agoPlay Store itself behaves similarly to App Store. Android lets you sideload through a separate mechanism, and all Google has to do is remove that switch from Android
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoThey could do lots of things, but absent any evidence that they're likely to, it's just wild speculation. And it's not "sideloading." There's no other local device involved. Once you've flipped the "unknown sources" switch, you just go to a website, download, and install, same as you would on a desktop.
- skc 8y agoThis is why I was always bemused at the glee with which people reacted to the deaths of all the other smartphone endeavors. And the tech press played a huge role in this with their blatant bias as well in my opinion. A healthy platforms war would have ensured that Apple/Google would have had to think twice about some of these practices.
- sametmax 8y agoMass market is how we got here. The phone made the flow of non tech savvy users the main source of income. Before, you had to please geeks, and they thought about products, compared, communicated, criticized and decided where to spend their money. Now, you have to please people that chose products based on ads, design and trends, but don't have any basic understanding of their device yet makes a lot of noise when they get them self in trouble. That's the same story anywhere you start with a group of passionate people on something that proves successful: amateurs arrive, then money, then policy. Any job, hobby, venue, city, sport, product, etc. is susceptible to this problem. It's why the mt Everest is now an expensive highway full of frozen shit, why battle net turned into an insult party, why Adventure park now have those unusable security systems that take the fun out of it, why websites abuse "target=_blank", why you have weird safety messages on microwaves and why you need to provide medical certificates for so many stupid things now a day. But. It's also why you can have a device in your pocket that act as your camera, tv, music player, news provider, landline, game console, pager, gps, phonebook for a 10th of the price of a gigantic calculator from 40 years ago. In the hilarious canadian comedy, "The Decline of the American Empire", the main character makes a point, stating there are 3 things that makes a winner in history: 1, number. 2, number. 3, number.
- zdkl 8y agoYou should do a post about your comment's first 4 paragraphs, something we can point our "almost there" non-geek friends to.
- gutnor 8y agoDesktop OS where designed for physical media first (side loading). The freedom came first, became part of the expected feature of a desktop, and it would be difficult to take it away. iPhone defined the image of the smartphone and they started internet first with a curated appstore. Also remember that in day to day life, from a user perspective, there are more benefits than downsides to the AppStore. Even today, finding software, software update, compatibility, license management, consistent original media availability, ... are actual problems in the desktop (especially windows) world and almost non existent in the iphone/smartphone world. To go back on the topic. I do hope that the TVApp does succeed, otherwise eventually a market actor will solve the problem and someone will wonder in 10 years how we ended up with cable companies again.
- vkou 8y agoAny business solely relies on the constant mercy of their power and water utilities. For some reason, though, we don't tolerate Seattle City Light choosing to arbitrarily not supply electricity to another company, or Cupertino's water utility charging extortive rates to Apple, just because the latter has deep pockets.
- StudentStuff 8y agoFunny you mention Seattle City Light, have you seen their new (vulnerable) smart meters? They're fun to tango with, broadcasting with FSK modulation on 900Mhz and 2.4Ghz :3
- vkou 8y agoSo, they are technically incompetent, and your business depends on them? Sounds like your business is unsustainable!
- StudentStuff 8y agoTo be clear, most smart meters employ any kind of encryption. Worse yet, the more rural areas switched to smart meters years before we did here in Seattle, meaning those utility customers have older meter models with even less protection. Short of opting out of smart metering (which you can do), your pretty well stuck with a vulnerable meter in much of the US.
- georgeecollins 8y agoThose utilities are heavily regulated. If they want to change their "terms of service" they have to go through a public commission.