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There many benefits of the closed model: One benefit is that if an app is successful but expensive, it opens up for competitors to undercut by price. With pi

There many benefits of the closed model: One benefit is that if an app is successful but expensive, it opens up for competitors to undercut by price. With piracy, many users would rather pirate the expensive #1 game than to run the lower cost #1938 game. With such a closed system, users will choose cheaper applications and it will help #1938 to rise to #45.This is very good for indie developers. Another benefit is for the consumers. When developers overprice their software, and users can pirate - they might. Then the developer blames lack of sales on piracy. However, when piracy is impossible, the developer can't blame piracy and must seek the true cause of poor sales, be it a high price or lack of quality. There's a lot of coverage already on the negatives with a closed store.

grishka 6y ago
In practice, I don't think the discovery aspect of app stores matters that much for anything but utility apps where you would search stuff like "docx viewer". It does matter for all kinds of apps when they feature something, and that's about it. Almost all developers have their own ways to drive traffic to their apps. I mean, I've been making Android apps since 2011, and I think that the role of app stores themselves is vastly overrated too. They have their place and they're nice to have, sure, but it's silly that OS vendors are allowed to have their own ones and either demote or outright ban anything that doesn't go through them. The transition to "always-online" was supposed to be more empowering, not more limiting. "But people would install malware..." It's okay for new technology to require education before one can make use of it. It's about time we get over it and stop treating users like children.