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by jakebasile 2108 days ago
That's not how it would work though. You'd see things similar to what Epic themselves did on Android originally, where they required people who wanted to play Fortnite to download the APK directly from Epic, which of course led to hundreds of fake and infected apps on the net, harming users.
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So which is better: having no Fortnite at all or having no Fortnite in the App Store with the option to sideload. If you strictly want to stay in the App Store then nothing changes for you and the situation is neither worse nor better. If you just want to play Fortnite on your iPhone and don't care about the App Store then the latter option is a better.
> So which is better: having no Fortnite at all or having no Fortnite in the App Store with the option to sideload

It's too simplistic and disingenuous to present it that way. Last month there was Fornite in the App Store and no option to sideload.

Right now I count 34 Adobe apps in the Apple's phone App Store. I'm very confident if this precedent is set Adobe will have their own app store and very likely will not have anything but a placeholder in Apple's App Store.

I'd rather have less apps available than to have every app of a certain revenue or above distributed independently. I don't want my iPhone to turn into my Windows gaming machine.

I want an iPhone primarily _because_ the App Store is the only place to get apps.

The last part of the GP comment still stands:

> which of course led to hundreds of fake and infected apps on the net, harming users.

> If you just want to play Fortnite on your iPhone and don't care about the App Store then the latter option is a better.

Not unless you get a Fortnite that has an ad at the bottom of the screen and ships as much PII as it can to some third-party company, or offers 2x v-bucks and steals CC info.

> which of course led to hundreds of fake and infected apps on the net, harming users.

The app stores are facilitating that in a way though. They're keeping the users as dumb as possible and not making any effort to differentiate between legitimate or malicious apps that are sideloaded.

If it were a matter of going to epicgames.com, clicking "Install for Android", and confirming a prompt that says "You're about to install an app from epicgames.com", I think it would be a lot easier to train users to understand that.