It's is very difficult for a third party app store to get started on Android. To get a large number of users using it you need to get it pre-installed on phones

It's is very difficult for a third party app store to get started on Android. To get a large number of users using it you need to get it pre-installed on phones before they are sold. Many carriers already have plans for their own app stores, however, or already have one like in South Korea. So that makes it even tougher to get deals like that. Google doesn't allow app stores to be offered via the Google Android Market, so there isn't even a runner up option of having users download it through the channel many of them do have. Non-AT&T Android phones do allow installing from a URL. So conceivably users could get the app store from a URL, but it is even tougher to get users to do that than it is to get them to download from Android Market. They also have to enable the unknown sources option in their settings, which some of them won't do. Without a large user base, developers won't post their apps to your store. I'm a developer and I've posted a few of my apps to third party stores. I get hardly any downloads compared to Android Market. So it just doesn't make sense for me, as a developer, to go posting my app to all these dead water third party app stores. There are a lot of them too. Hardly a week goes by where I don't get some spam email from a third party app store that scraped the developer emails off the Market listings. So even if I did post to a third party app store, it would be making a choice amongst a large number of them.