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by michaelmrose 2923 days ago
The long term solution CAN'T be the MS store. It requires asking Microsoft for permission to compete with them. It gives MS permission to bar entire categories of software globally or in your particular market.

Giving the party running the store 30% of all revenue is a hard sale to start with.

More importantly it gives MS the position to impose whatever dictates it or even more likely every government in existence the right to impose whatever restrictions they like on any app maker in existence with the threat of instant non existence.

Want a social media platform to ban anyone who disagrees with the king no problem do it or you can't do business. Want your browser to censor whatever your locality wants? No problem if it doesn't it doesn't get distributed. Want your OS to refuse to install apps that don't follow the store rules? No problem its in the governments interests and the companies.

Linux package management works like an app store with an official source and the ability to add whichever sources you choose. A search of available packages shows results giving sources the priority set by the user. Updating the system updates packages from 3rd party sources same as others. The major limitation is the labour required to create packages for all the different platforms users prefer not artificial limits or money paid to the platform "owner".

On windows nothing much is on the store mostly because people don't want to give Microsoft 30% on Linux charging 30% is downright impossible because people would trivially publish an alternative source instead.

Basically your cure is worse than the disease and since Microsoft wont fix the situation in a reasonable fashion so the only solution is to move off their platform.

4 comments

What is your ideal solution? Which platform should we move to? On Linux I can download Filezilla and it run it untrusted too. So obviously there is no Linux distro that satisfies your requirements because this exact same issue can happen there. Same on Mac. Heck, even Windows is willing to warn you. iOS and the like give Apple similar permissions that you are against, so "the long term solution CAN'T be" the Apple app store.
I agree with you about the control aspect, but.

> On windows nothing much is on the store mostly because people don't want to give Microsoft 30% on Linux charging 30% is downright impossible because people would trivially publish an alternative source instead.

Most package managers on Linux do not provide any sort of revenue stream. The comparison only holds when the software is free, at which point '30%' is $0.

The main exception I'm aware of, the elementaryOS app center, provides a worse deal. Same 70/30 split for $2 charges, but it's 50/50 on a $1 charge.

> It requires asking Microsoft for permission to compete with them

On that note, Apple now distributes iTunes for Windows through the Microsoft Store.

I wonder if MS would have been on board with that around the time they were launching the Zune.
> Giving the party running the store 30% of all revenue is a hard sale to start with.

Very soon it won't be 30% anymore.

https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/05/07/a-new-micr...

> Linux package management works like an app store with an official source and the ability to add whichever sources you choose. A search of available packages shows results giving sources the priority set by the user. Updating the system updates packages from 3rd party sources same as others.

There exist 3rd party package repositories on Windows too.

> On windows nothing much is on the store mostly because people don't want to give Microsoft 30%

There is plenty of stuff in the MS Store. https://youtu.be/GCVhmKVRkk0

All my software, except for some dev tools and some games are from the MS Store.

> on Linux charging 30% is downright impossible because people would trivially publish an alternative source instead.

Steam is on Linux and charges 30%.

> Basically your cure is worse than the disease and since Microsoft wont fix the situation in a reasonable fashion so the only solution is to move off their platform.

Microsoft already provided a fix, called UWP.

"There exist 3rd party package repositories on Windows too."

The MS store does NOT have user configurable repos for consumer versions of windows.

You don't need the MS Store for 3rd party repositories.
You: "No, the long term solution is to embrace the MS Store"

Me: No solution which gives a single party absolute control over what software a user is allowed to run is a long term solution.