While I understand the concern over the single appstore monopoly that we have on any device, I think it’s worth remembering what ecosystem android and IOS came into.
The old multimedia phones that were sold in the mid 00s were effectively “smart”. Many of them ran java and you could install programs, and freely install ringtones, and browsers that actually worked like opera mini/mobile. The thing is you couldnt by default. At least not in the US. The devices were locked down and everything you did went through the carrier’s store. And US telecom services are some of the greediest and scummiest companies out there so you couldnt even use your own mp3 files as a ringtone.
Apple combated this with their closed off ecosystem, but android did face issues with fragmentation in the early days and needed a way to prevent the telecoms branded phones from stinking up the ecosystem. They did this by leveraging the play services and play store. From the playstore they can also since mainline release various peacemeal updates which helps resolve their other issue with fragmentation and thats android device being abandoned.
Sure enough you can still release your own version of android without it, amazon’s tablets and tv sticks do pretty well.
That said I do think it’s a good to help people move past the default and open up the platforms more, I just wish it would apply to all smart devices,
Yup. I was part of Verizon’s app development program and it was a fucking joke. Even if the dev tools and build chain wasn’t a complete mess, and even if the dev license wasn’t expensive, and even if it wasn’t almost impossible to even get test hardware… Even if you managed to build something more useful than snake, you’d still have to wait months and months and months for Verizon to sign your apps and then months more before they’d be available on any handset. I’m legitimately not sure it was even possible for a small dev to get anything approved.
Open app stores were and still are amazing. I get that people want even more freedom, but coming from the trauma of feature phone development, I find it hard to get upset about this, especially considering Android makes it dead simple to sideload.
While I understand the concern over the single appstore monopoly that we have on any device, I think it’s worth remembering what ecosystem android and IOS came into.
The old multimedia phones that were sold in the mid 00s were effectively “smart”. Many of them ran java and you could install programs, and freely install ringtones, and browsers that actually worked like opera mini/mobile. The thing is you couldnt by default. At least not in the US. The devices were locked down and everything you did went through the carrier’s store. And US telecom services are some of the greediest and scummiest companies out there so you couldnt even use your own mp3 files as a ringtone.
Apple combated this with their closed off ecosystem, but android did face issues with fragmentation in the early days and needed a way to prevent the telecoms branded phones from stinking up the ecosystem. They did this by leveraging the play services and play store. From the playstore they can also since mainline release various peacemeal updates which helps resolve their other issue with fragmentation and thats android device being abandoned.
Sure enough you can still release your own version of android without it, amazon’s tablets and tv sticks do pretty well.
That said I do think it’s a good to help people move past the default and open up the platforms more, I just wish it would apply to all smart devices,
Yup. I was part of Verizon’s app development program and it was a fucking joke. Even if the dev tools and build chain wasn’t a complete mess, and even if the dev license wasn’t expensive, and even if it wasn’t almost impossible to even get test hardware… Even if you managed to build something more useful than snake, you’d still have to wait months and months and months for Verizon to sign your apps and then months more before they’d be available on any handset. I’m legitimately not sure it was even possible for a small dev to get anything approved.
Open app stores were and still are amazing. I get that people want even more freedom, but coming from the trauma of feature phone development, I find it hard to get upset about this, especially considering Android makes it dead simple to sideload.
Thanks, ChatGPT.