Having only one app store allowed on a device is anti-competitive and is an area where I would approve regulators forcing changes. The fact that Apple has exclusive right to approve what I can install, and then extracts monopoly rent on top of depriving me of software, should be banned.
In an interview [1], Tim Sweeney, Epic Games CEO, addressed why they opted to bypass Google Play:<p><i>GamesBeat: Do you see a reason not to put it on Google Play right now? Is that something that would happen in the future?</i><p><i>Sweeney: There are two reasons for what we’re doing. First, we want to have a direct relationship with our customers wherever we can. On open platforms like PC and Android, it’s possible for them to get the software direct from us. We can be in contact with them and not have a third-party distributor in between.</i><p><i>The second motivation is the economics of the store ecosystem as it exists right now. There’s typically a 30/70 split, and from the 70 percent, the developer pays all the costs of developing the game, operating it, marketing it, acquiring users and everything else. For most developers that eats up the majority of their revenue. We’re trying to make our software available to users in as economically efficient a way as possible. That means distributing the software directly to them, taking payment through Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, and other options, and not having a store take 30 percent.</i><p><i>If you look at it, the stores on the smartphone platforms actually do very little. They’ll put ads up in front of your game. When you search for Fortnite on iOS you’ll often get PUBG or Minecraft ads. Whoever bought that ad in front of us is the top result when searching for Fortnite. It’s just a bad experience. Why not just make the game available direct to users, instead of having the store get between us and our customers and inject all kinds of cruft like that? It’s a general criticism I have of the smartphone platforms right now.</i><p>[1] <a href="https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/03/tim-sweeney-epics-ceo-on-fortnite-on-android-skipping-google-play-and-the-open-metaverse/view-all/" rel="nofollow">https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/03/tim-sweeney-epics-ceo-on-...</a>
Oh boy, that's gonna be a <i>lot</i> of people enabling the installation of APKs from untrusted sources. I can't see this working well from a security perspective.
This probably will rub Google the wrong way.. I wonder how many millions they will lose out on because of this.<p>Maybe they should introduce some special reduced fee teirs for the ultra high volume customers, as a precaution against this becoming a trend.<p>On the other hand fortnight is probably the only app where it's users want it so bad they will be willing to do just about any procedure to get it on the phones. Everything else has competitors on the Play store.
Google punished again for having a more open platform. With this and EU's lawsuit attacking Google for allowing other OEMs to sell Android with conditions, Google's incentive is to copy Apple and lock everything down and make it all proprietary.
I've had to disinfect so many of my friends computers because they downloaded VLC media player from a website that looks darn close to something "official" but wasn't. Even with the one-time perms to allow this specific app to be installed from outside the GPS I can definitely see this being a headache for not only Google because of the high profile and popularity of this game but also Epic. Good luck to everyone involved.
I feel like part of the 30% tax that app stores extract is based on how easy it is for users to simply buy what they want with money that's probably already in their account. Most of the money that I've spent on apple and google apps comes from gift cards. If I had fortnite on my android phone, and considered making an impulse buy, and was required to put in credit card info, I might reconsider the purchase.
Tim Sweeney has always been a very outspoken critic of app stores. He's famously rattled his saber about the Windows Store every chance he gets, despite the fact that outside Store installations will never realistically, ever go away.<p>So an opposition to the Play Store on moral grounds is pretty much what I'd expect here from him. I'm guessing the 30% cut is just the cash incentive he needed to convince the rest of his team that this was the right way to go.
This is how it should be.<p>Monopolized software distribution platform is bad for so many reasons.<p>And for anyone claiming that this is bad for security, blame Google and Apple who don't support the other way of secure software distribution and try to lock-in to their proprietary locked-in platform for the greed.<p>Also, Don't use Android or iPhone in the first place because it's so restricted, unsecure, and cannot be trusted one bit.
Is there not a FOSS store on Android that provides app signing and doesn't charge anything? This is an opportunity for Fortnite's creators to create their own store which then installs their app.