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by candiddevmike
934 days ago
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I wish folks would realize this has knock on effects for them--you're paying 30% more for things (or 15%, if it's a small developer). Is the "safety and curation" of the Play Store (or Apple App Store) worth 30% more to you? (Full disclosure: I moved my apps off the Apple App Store/Google Play Store earlier this year. I wasn't seeing any value with distributing on them. After leaving, I've had better interactions with my users and almost all of the folks who discover my apps end up upgrading to the paid version. While my installs are lower, my conversion rate has never been higher.) |
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Yes, because as you said, there are knock-on effects.
With a first-party app store, I know I can easily cancel subscriptions, and from a single place; that the payment option isn’t going to be some no-name payment processor or that I’m not going to told it was one price on the screen and then charged another price in the backend; that at least one third party has done at least some minimum level of verification that it’s not malicious; that it isn’t circumventing privacy controls; that app updates occur in one place instead of having to individually launch and update each app (e.g., Sparkle); that, while app review has non-trivial flaws, it does catch certain kinds and amounts of crapplications, and tends to have a second-order consequence of improving platform consistency.
So while I may pay more and/or the developer might earn less, installing apps the old-fashioned way carries way more risk. The days of implicit trust that someone random Joe’s apps will behave themselves and act like good platform citizens are over.