It's pretty ludicrous that this is an accepted notion. App stores are anticompetitve practices at their finest. (Especially Apple's situation, where they're competing with offerings from companies like Amazon, and slapping them with 30% cuts that price them out.)

We have two smartphone platforms that have basically full control over third party software. A company or individual that produces application layer software can hardly just come out with their own OS (and expect any amount of mass adoption). It's preposterous.

This goes even deeper than the issues with the Microsoft investigations of the 90s, but the only difference is a lack of monopoly-level marketshare. Which is hardly a sufficient excuse to permit this kind of behavior.

Maybe they ought to be regulated as public utilities.

With mandated dispute resolution.

> but by this logic noone should write mobile apps

But they shouldn't. 99% of apps out there could just be a PWA, specially in the Android ecosystem that favours them.

The technology is largely irrelevant here. If you wrote your app as PWA and then got banned from the Google App store you'd still be losing access to that market and ecosystem, and the mechanism for delivering an app to users. That's the real problem here.

PWAs offer something similar but not really the same, especially if you're charging for the app itself or doing IAPs.

Been arguing this forever. Jobs was actually correct. He just pivoted because he figured out that an App Store could make him billions and control end-to-end the economy and the device, which is always what he's wanted.

Web apps are the way to go. Not mobile apps in a store.

Maybe, but Apple's PWA support is still not great.

It's by the exact same logic that scientists still publish papers through Elsevier. We, all of us, enable these monopolists.

I'd say that's incomplete logic. Nobody should write exclusively mobile apps.

Write your service as a web site, and have native apps for a better and more integrated user experience.

I see this as an extension of the way the web is supposed to degrade gracefully.

No buts. EXACTLY this.

Unless you are a unicorn or a huckster writing mobile apps is no longer an attractive business.

We provide a hybrid app development platform for mobile and over the last nine years we've watched a steady exodus of developers from the app space.

The only folk who are still relatively unaffected are the business developers.

I'm not entirely sure why anyone thinks downvoting observations from reality will change their outcomes but hey… this is slashdot^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H HN I guess.

Indeed.

Exceptions apply (like having investors with enough clout to get Google's attention), but yes, that's exactly what a lot of us are saying.

Don't build apps (or at least don't make them central to your strategy).

Mobile apps can be a value-add rather than the core of the business.