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> This is a good example of how innovation, competition and small businesses are being stifled by the anticompetitive behavior of the mobile app distribution ca

by pdonis 5y ago

> This is a good example of how innovation, competition and small businesses are being stifled by the anticompetitive behavior of the mobile app distribution cartel. No, it's an example of how small businesses are foolishly making their business model dependent on a company that is known to be unreliable. What should be happening is that mobile app distributors should not be depending on Google at all; alternate mobile app stores should be out-competing them by providing better service to developers. If there is a "cartel" that is making that difficult, it's not the mobile app store gatekeepers, it's the mobile phone companies that are tilting the playing field sharply in favor of the Android phones they distribute, which are tied to Google Play Store, instead of allowing free and open competition in phone operating systems.

josephcsible 5y ago
The manufacturers' hands are tied. People aren't going to buy a phone that they can't run Snapchat and Netflix on.
- Retric 5y ago
  I don’t care about running either on my phone. I have watched YouTube instructional videos, but I can’t see the appeal of watching a movie on a tiny phone screen. As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    are you representative of most people? I certainly wouldn't say I am.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Considering actual adoption numbers I think I might be representing of most people in this. How many people do you know that actually watch Netflix on their phone?
      - psyc 5y ago
        I watch TV/movies almost exclusively on the phone. Not because it’s the best experience, but simply because it’s the only device that is on my person at all times. So it has been years since I thought in terms of going to a screen to watch something.
        Retric 5y ago
        Which is still quite rare when you look at peoples cellphone network usage. In 2020 the average cellphone user in North America only consumed 11.8 GB per month and the median is much lower. That really isn’t enough to be regularly be watching videos.
        heavyset_go 5y ago
        Netflix allows you to download and cache videos for later viewing, and some carriers don't count streaming videos on certain platforms against their users' data usage.
        josephcsible 5y ago
        But people can watch videos over Wi-Fi on their phones, not just over cellular data.
        2cb 5y ago
        Not rare at all if you sit on a train and glance around you. I see people watching movies/TV on phones and tablets constantly out in public. Very common. It's partly the reason I got a Fold 3. Very good for on the move media consumption. As for data use, aside from the points already brought up - ability to download for later from Netflix, certain services not counting towards data usage on some plans, etc - Netflix and other streaming services will also know you are on a mobile network and provide a more compressed stream at a lower resolution (720p with lower encoding settings being common) to reduce data usage and buffering.
        Retric 5y ago
        People on a train aren’t a representative sample, nor is every video on a cellphone Netflix. Tablets are of course another story people regularly watch movies on those because the screen isn’t tiny. Which gets back to the basic point people don’t watch a lot of video on cellphones and Netflix is usage is even lower.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    > As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work. Messaging apps have a network effect. You can't just jump ship from one at will, or you get cut off from all of your friends who didn't jump along with you.
    - Retric 5y ago
      They aren’t sticky enough on their own to avoid people just installing the next one. I think I have used 10 of the things at various points but SMS and email are still massively more popular. Remember Yahoo messenger etc?
      - 2cb 5y ago
        This is a very US centric view. In virtually all of Europe, for instance, WhatsApp is the go to messenger and no one uses SMS anymore. In some countries - primarily Russia, but also in Europe e.g. Germany and increasingly the UK - Telegram is also popular, and Viber is popular in African countries, while WeChat is used extensively in China, and so on... people have to use the messenger everyone else is on. I do use Signal to chat to close friends, and Telegram has become popular enough as a second to WhatsApp that I often use it too, but as others have said it's a strong network effect. The only other messenger I can remember having the position WhatsApp has was BBM back in the day. But as soon as BlackBerries went out of fashion it was all WhatsApp and has been ever since.
        Retric 5y ago
        In 2020 and the UK alone 50 billion SMS text messages where sent, that’s quite a bit for something nobody uses. It’s very true people send use other platforms to send a lot of messages, but they all lack the utter ubiquity of SMS.
        2cb 5y ago
        > The number of outgoing SMS and MMS messages sent in the United Kingdom (UK) fell to 48.68 billion in 2020, from a peak of 150.83 billion in 2012. The fall in the number of SMS and MMS messages sent over mobile networks in the UK, coincides with a surge in popularity of apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. https://www.statista.com/statistics/271561/number-of-sent-sms-messages-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/271561/number-of-sent-sm...
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work. Absolutely not. Telecommunications applications have extremely strong network effects. There is no jumping ship to whatever works, people will do whatever is necessary to join the network their social circles participate in. In my country it's virtually impossible to communicate without WhatsApp. People buy phones just to run WhatsApp. I've had Signal installed for years and I've not received a single message there, not even from technologically minded friends who really should know better.
    - Retric 5y ago
      WhatsApp only has 500m daily average users worldwide, while being installed on 2 billion phones. Do you expect it to maintain it’s #2 spot for 10 years? None of them have had a run that long.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        Does it matter? The fact is pretty much everyone in my country uses WhatsApp. There is no getting away from it. It's so absurdly important ISPs have stopped metering WhatsApp traffic. A phone that doesn't run WhatsApp is a literal paperweight. Mobile telephony is irrelevant: 98% of incoming calls are automated marketing/scam calls, the rest are people who couldn't call me on WhatsApp for some reason. It gets to the point I wish I could turn it off. SMS is irrelevant: it's mostly 2FA codes, companies using it as a notifications system and phishing.
        Retric 5y ago
        It matters because the segment of population in your country that doesn’t care about WhatsApp is a nucleus of adoption for both the next messaging app and a phone without WhatsApp. Facebook is already hedging it’s bets by owning and promoting the next most popular messaging app.
        matheusmoreira 5y ago
- pdonis 5y ago
  > The manufacturers' hands are tied. By "mobile phone companies" I didn't mean mobile phone manufacturers. I meant mobile phone providers like Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. They are the ones who have wormed themselves into the role of gatekeepers for phone purchases (with government help). If phone manufacturers' hands are tied with regard to what they can put on their phones or what app stores their phones can use, they're tied by the phone providers, not by users.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    Even if Verizon were to back something like Tizen or Windows Phone, how would that fix the lack-of-apps problem?
advisedwang 5y ago
What else is a mobile game dev supposed to do? Ask customers to sideload? Tell people to use f-droid? If they do that they're restricting themselves to a tiny fraction of the possible audience and thereby removing any chance they have of being profitable.
- pdonis 5y ago
  > What else is a mobile game dev supposed to do? Start a startup to make a mobile app store that out-competes Google. Somebody is going to have to do it sooner or later. Young devs with nothing to lose are the best people to try.
  - anonymousab 5y ago
    > Start a startup [...] that out-competes Google You know, I don't think that "just be better than the trillion dollar incumbent" is a reasonable starting point for any healthy market.
    - pdonis 5y ago
      > I don't think that "just be better than the trillion dollar incumbent" is a reasonable starting point for any healthy market. I'm not proposing this solution because I think it's easy. I'm proposing it because I think it's the only one that has any chance of actually fixing the problem long term. Government fiat won't fix it; it will make it worse, the same way government fiat in general makes problems worse, not better.
      - jpe90 5y ago
        > the same way government fiat in general makes problems worse, not better. To be clear, you're saying that U.S. antitrust legislation left us worse off, historically?
        wussboy 5y ago
        Or the ban against lead additives. Or against child labour. Or any one of hundreds of massive benefits that government fiat has brought us.
bobthepanda 5y ago
Phone OSes are hard. Tizen was a big play for it and that ended up being a dud. Windows Phone was also another well-funded competitor that fell on its face. Really, the problem is that phone manufacturers want to be where the apps are, and app developers barely keep it together making native apps for the two dominant OSes. Another competitor would need to make it really, really easy to make apps performant when ported over with minimal work, because the ugly truth is that no one is going to hire a full third team to develop for another OS that's just starting out.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  > Another competitor would need to make it really, really easy to make apps performant when ported over with minimal work But this is completely impossible, and Google helps make it that way. Their SafetyNet API lets apps verify that the device is running an official, unmodified Android build, and a lot of very popular apps will refuse to run otherwise.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    There's no way to fake this? I just looked it up and it seems Magisk is able to fake these attestations somehow. I remember using it to get some mobile games to shut up about my rooted phone. How would rooted devices and custom ROMs work otherwise? I hate it when these fucking companies use cryptography to control us. Cryptography should be empowering us...
    - josephcsible 5y ago
      Magisk can fake them for now, but only because Google still supports some pre-TrustZone phones. On newer phones, you can't fake TrustZone, and eventually older phones will just always fail SafetyNet.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        That sucks. If this is what the future holds for Android, I think I'm just gonna switch to Apple already. There's no point to Android if Google insists on destroying everything that made it great.
skeeter2020 5y ago
maybe if there was any other option. It's not like everyone on Android has a million distribution options. It's the most popular OS in the world and there is essentially one company that makes its own rules controlling what gets onto phones.

by pdonis 5y ago

josephcsible 5y ago

The manufacturers' hands are tied. People aren't going to buy a phone that they can't run Snapchat and Netflix on.

Retric 5y ago
I don’t care about running either on my phone. I have watched YouTube instructional videos, but I can’t see the appeal of watching a movie on a tiny phone screen. As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  are you representative of most people? I certainly wouldn't say I am.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Considering actual adoption numbers I think I might be representing of most people in this. How many people do you know that actually watch Netflix on their phone?
    - psyc 5y ago
      I watch TV/movies almost exclusively on the phone. Not because it’s the best experience, but simply because it’s the only device that is on my person at all times. So it has been years since I thought in terms of going to a screen to watch something.
      - Retric 5y ago
        Which is still quite rare when you look at peoples cellphone network usage. In 2020 the average cellphone user in North America only consumed 11.8 GB per month and the median is much lower. That really isn’t enough to be regularly be watching videos.
        heavyset_go 5y ago
        Netflix allows you to download and cache videos for later viewing, and some carriers don't count streaming videos on certain platforms against their users' data usage.
        josephcsible 5y ago
        But people can watch videos over Wi-Fi on their phones, not just over cellular data.
        2cb 5y ago
        Not rare at all if you sit on a train and glance around you. I see people watching movies/TV on phones and tablets constantly out in public. Very common. It's partly the reason I got a Fold 3. Very good for on the move media consumption. As for data use, aside from the points already brought up - ability to download for later from Netflix, certain services not counting towards data usage on some plans, etc - Netflix and other streaming services will also know you are on a mobile network and provide a more compressed stream at a lower resolution (720p with lower encoding settings being common) to reduce data usage and buffering.
        Retric 5y ago
        People on a train aren’t a representative sample, nor is every video on a cellphone Netflix. Tablets are of course another story people regularly watch movies on those because the screen isn’t tiny. Which gets back to the basic point people don’t watch a lot of video on cellphones and Netflix is usage is even lower.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  > As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work. Messaging apps have a network effect. You can't just jump ship from one at will, or you get cut off from all of your friends who didn't jump along with you.
  - Retric 5y ago
    They aren’t sticky enough on their own to avoid people just installing the next one. I think I have used 10 of the things at various points but SMS and email are still massively more popular. Remember Yahoo messenger etc?
    - 2cb 5y ago
      This is a very US centric view. In virtually all of Europe, for instance, WhatsApp is the go to messenger and no one uses SMS anymore. In some countries - primarily Russia, but also in Europe e.g. Germany and increasingly the UK - Telegram is also popular, and Viber is popular in African countries, while WeChat is used extensively in China, and so on... people have to use the messenger everyone else is on. I do use Signal to chat to close friends, and Telegram has become popular enough as a second to WhatsApp that I often use it too, but as others have said it's a strong network effect. The only other messenger I can remember having the position WhatsApp has was BBM back in the day. But as soon as BlackBerries went out of fashion it was all WhatsApp and has been ever since.
      - Retric 5y ago
        In 2020 and the UK alone 50 billion SMS text messages where sent, that’s quite a bit for something nobody uses. It’s very true people send use other platforms to send a lot of messages, but they all lack the utter ubiquity of SMS.
        2cb 5y ago
        > The number of outgoing SMS and MMS messages sent in the United Kingdom (UK) fell to 48.68 billion in 2020, from a peak of 150.83 billion in 2012. The fall in the number of SMS and MMS messages sent over mobile networks in the UK, coincides with a surge in popularity of apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. https://www.statista.com/statistics/271561/number-of-sent-sms-messages-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/271561/number-of-sent-sm...
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work. Absolutely not. Telecommunications applications have extremely strong network effects. There is no jumping ship to whatever works, people will do whatever is necessary to join the network their social circles participate in. In my country it's virtually impossible to communicate without WhatsApp. People buy phones just to run WhatsApp. I've had Signal installed for years and I've not received a single message there, not even from technologically minded friends who really should know better.
  - Retric 5y ago
    WhatsApp only has 500m daily average users worldwide, while being installed on 2 billion phones. Do you expect it to maintain it’s #2 spot for 10 years? None of them have had a run that long.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Does it matter? The fact is pretty much everyone in my country uses WhatsApp. There is no getting away from it. It's so absurdly important ISPs have stopped metering WhatsApp traffic. A phone that doesn't run WhatsApp is a literal paperweight. Mobile telephony is irrelevant: 98% of incoming calls are automated marketing/scam calls, the rest are people who couldn't call me on WhatsApp for some reason. It gets to the point I wish I could turn it off. SMS is irrelevant: it's mostly 2FA codes, companies using it as a notifications system and phishing.
      - Retric 5y ago
        It matters because the segment of population in your country that doesn’t care about WhatsApp is a nucleus of adoption for both the next messaging app and a phone without WhatsApp. Facebook is already hedging it’s bets by owning and promoting the next most popular messaging app.
        matheusmoreira 5y ago
pdonis 5y ago
> The manufacturers' hands are tied. By "mobile phone companies" I didn't mean mobile phone manufacturers. I meant mobile phone providers like Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. They are the ones who have wormed themselves into the role of gatekeepers for phone purchases (with government help). If phone manufacturers' hands are tied with regard to what they can put on their phones or what app stores their phones can use, they're tied by the phone providers, not by users.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  Even if Verizon were to back something like Tizen or Windows Phone, how would that fix the lack-of-apps problem?

advisedwang 5y ago

What else is a mobile game dev supposed to do? Ask customers to sideload? Tell people to use f-droid? If they do that they're restricting themselves to a tiny fraction of the possible audience and thereby removing any chance they have of being profitable.

pdonis 5y ago
> What else is a mobile game dev supposed to do? Start a startup to make a mobile app store that out-competes Google. Somebody is going to have to do it sooner or later. Young devs with nothing to lose are the best people to try.
- anonymousab 5y ago
  > Start a startup [...] that out-competes Google You know, I don't think that "just be better than the trillion dollar incumbent" is a reasonable starting point for any healthy market.
  - pdonis 5y ago
    > I don't think that "just be better than the trillion dollar incumbent" is a reasonable starting point for any healthy market. I'm not proposing this solution because I think it's easy. I'm proposing it because I think it's the only one that has any chance of actually fixing the problem long term. Government fiat won't fix it; it will make it worse, the same way government fiat in general makes problems worse, not better.
    - jpe90 5y ago
      > the same way government fiat in general makes problems worse, not better. To be clear, you're saying that U.S. antitrust legislation left us worse off, historically?
      - wussboy 5y ago
        Or the ban against lead additives. Or against child labour. Or any one of hundreds of massive benefits that government fiat has brought us.

bobthepanda 5y ago

Phone OSes are hard. Tizen was a big play for it and that ended up being a dud. Windows Phone was also another well-funded competitor that fell on its face. Really, the problem is that phone manufacturers want to be where the apps are, and app developers barely keep it together making native apps for the two dominant OSes. Another competitor would need to make it really, really easy to make apps performant when ported over with minimal work, because the ugly truth is that no one is going to hire a full third team to develop for another OS that's just starting out.

josephcsible 5y ago
> Another competitor would need to make it really, really easy to make apps performant when ported over with minimal work But this is completely impossible, and Google helps make it that way. Their SafetyNet API lets apps verify that the device is running an official, unmodified Android build, and a lot of very popular apps will refuse to run otherwise.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  There's no way to fake this? I just looked it up and it seems Magisk is able to fake these attestations somehow. I remember using it to get some mobile games to shut up about my rooted phone. How would rooted devices and custom ROMs work otherwise? I hate it when these fucking companies use cryptography to control us. Cryptography should be empowering us...
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    Magisk can fake them for now, but only because Google still supports some pre-TrustZone phones. On newer phones, you can't fake TrustZone, and eventually older phones will just always fail SafetyNet.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      That sucks. If this is what the future holds for Android, I think I'm just gonna switch to Apple already. There's no point to Android if Google insists on destroying everything that made it great.

skeeter2020 5y ago

maybe if there was any other option. It's not like everyone on Android has a million distribution options. It's the most popular OS in the world and there is essentially one company that makes its own rules controlling what gets onto phones.