[jhanschoo]

> All "big" players still go through the Play Store.

There are many big players that don't go through the Play Store, and for a variety of reasons. Fortnite and ISP-promoted apps and device-manucacturer apps (for business and leverage reasons), DMM (because a primary line of their business is in adult content), and basically everything in mainland China (because Google doesn't operate there).

These players all operate their own app stores.

[skinnymuch]

Isn’t Fortnite basically entirely back on the play store and that’s where most users are coming from? That proves it doesn’t work.

[jhanschoo]

You're right (https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/21/epic-games-launches-fortni...), I suppose that they evaluated those 18 months and judged that it wasn't as profitable not being on the Play store.

But ISPs still deliver apps through their app stores, and whole segments of big players also successfully distribute outside of it, out of necessity: adult content and the Chinese ecosystem. Note that the DMM example I cited is unheard of outside of Japan, but very well-known in Japan itself.

[skinnymuch]

What or how are adult sites distributing successfully? I think the biggest paid sites have apps. But I’ve never personally heard of any one using any porn tube site app or anything. Browsers are used.

I’m genuinely curious. I have no clue.

[jhanschoo]

In Japan, DMM is a very diversified company (it runs a very well known hackerspace, for example), and a very profitable business comes from mobile-oriented games. Many of the erotic mobile-oriented games have a web browser version or PC version, and the more recent ones have native apps as well. In addition some have a censored version as well sharing the same account.

The app store is just called DMM Games store [0], since it distributes both its age-unrestricted games as well as games under its adult imprint (Fanza) via it.

With videos, since stores of videos are allowed on the play store, you instead have the situation that the DMM videos app is available on Android and iPhone, and the Fanza imprint is separately downloadable on Android [1, nsfw, needs vpn]

[0]: http://www.dmm.com/netgame/app/appstore/guide.html

[1]: https://www.dmm.co.jp/digital/android_intro/index.html

[skinnymuch]

Thanks for this! I had no idea about any of this

[jhanschoo]

I'm quite confused that this comment of mine is presently sitting at -1 score at the time of writing. I think I provided good evidence that a fundamental assumption of parent comment was incorrect.