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Why do we have a duopoly? You can draw a direct logical line to the complexity of shipping apps through an app store. Right now, an app, say, Spotify, has to cr
by phendrenad2 5y ago
Why do we have a duopoly? You can draw a direct logical line to the complexity of shipping apps through an app store. Right now, an app, say, Spotify, has to create two versions of their app (iOS and Android), and package them for the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
(Buuut that's not even the whole truth. Mobile OS updates frequently break backward compatibility, so iOS and Android apps need to gracefully handle backward and forward compatibility, often special-casing different OS versions or screen resolutions).
Anyway, if, say, Amazon resuscitated their Fire Phone, which would use the Amazon App Store, then Spotify would have to package their app for the Amazon store... which costs developer (or at least a release coordinator) time. That's a barrier to entry that doesn't exist in the PC ecosystem.
- igorstellar 5y ago> That's a barrier to entry that doesn't exist in the PC ecosystem. Unless you're using some native language like C++ and cross-platform UI framework like QT or js/Electron you have even bigger diversity problem in the PC ecosystem. There are Windows (x86/arm), macOS (x86/arm), linux (variable desktop environments), Chrome OS, ... You would need to provide builds for all the OS and hopefully also provide Store versions (Windows Store, AppStore, Snap)
- thayne 5y agoto be fair that is probably a major reason that we haven't seen the year of the linux desktop, and for that matter no other OS has really been able to break the Windows/Mac duopoly in desktop OSes.
- pmontra 5y agoI remember that I was ardently hoping that Windows Mobile would fail soon because of the extra cost it added to development. One platform is too little (remember IE6) and three is too much. And yet I work with a Linux laptop but I build web apps deployed to Linux servers.