Walled garden only exists because mobile devices make self-install alternatives very difficult or impossible to get on purpose, otherwise they would not be able to compete in any ways.
Case in point, the Mac App Store and the Windows Store are both moderate failures despite a lot of technical & marketing push.
The Mac App Store is not a failure from the user side, it's where users would look first. Nobody wants to have to go to different websites/repositories every N days to update all of their apps/drivers, or put up with spam from 10 different update notification mechanisms. I still remember that hell from barely 12 years ago. Why do you think gamers flocked to Steam?
As a developer, it's more of a failure of Apple's dismal documentation; I -want- my product to be a nicely sandboxed, well-behaved citizen that only accesses exactly just what it needs, but the state of macOS API documentation was too grim to learn how to do that the last time I tried (like "security bookmarks" and "file providers" from a relatively-simple Swift app).
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Myself, I would never want to trust anything centralized.
So... major failure? Is that what's in between moderate and massive?
If so, I'd love to have a major failure. :)
How is that different from trusting multiple sources? You'd just be multiplying your concerns. Any of them could slip in some malware.
The only advantage I can think of is censorship resistance, or access to older versions and discontinued products.
The exposure is also not any worse when the people you trust are equally trustworthy. If you install ten apps from one distributor or ten apps from ten distributors and all of the distributors are equally trustworthy, the chance of an app you installed being approved even though it was malware is the same. It may even be lower because the distributors have to worry more about their reputations when there is competition.
And it also applies the other way. Right now they can reject apps that you want not because the apps are malicious but because they compete with the distributor's own. If there were five other trustworthy distributors then you could install it from any of them. So you could always get e-readers that compete with Amazon from Google, search apps that compete with Google from Microsoft, web browsers that compete with Apple from Mozilla and so on, no matter what kind of device you have.
Which applications did they want to install from outside sources? Which sources?
Where does something advertise itself as an iPhone app but not available on the App Store?
Like frogs cooking in water, macOS and Windows users will be eventually realize that all their apps are store based as well.
And for everything else they get Web apps, including AAA games.
The missing authority the user has over it is.
E.g. you can have no wallet gardens but still sandbox every single application (which btw. I would prefer).
Plenty to choose from.
And try not to conflate walled gardens with software repositories. The benefits of the latter are available without the wall. The wall is significant because it stops you making your own trust judgements.
Single point of failure.
> > Let this be another nail in the coffin of the "walled garden" farce.
> There is no coffin, the walled gardens are not dying, and have long since become the norm, which happened because the people found them to be better than the alternative: getting apps (and manually updating them) from many different sources of varying quality and convenience.
No. The people have no alternative. How many people are able to install F-Droid on theyr phone ?
These are not the only two options. What about multiple authorities, but not random individual developers? That's basically how it works with e.g. game stores on PC (though Steam is certainly the largest), or package repositories on Linux.
Like you, I like being able to trust an authority to vet the software I install rather than having to judge the trustworthiness of each individual developer, but I'm not a fan of there only being one authority by design (as it is on e.g. iOS). It introduces a single point of failure and gives that authority full control over all software on that platform - for better or worse. Many package managers specifically deal with the issue of consolidating updates to a single system while not relying on a single authority.
> Like you, I like being able to trust an authority to vet the software I install rather than having to judge the trustworthiness of each individual developer, but I'm not a fan of there only being one authority by design (as it is on e.g. iOS).
You can already do this on Android though. Samsung offers an individual app store for it's phones, and FDroid works on all phones.
If multiple authorities can sign apps, it sort of defeats the point and makes the sandboxing less trustworthy.
Right now, I can either: Rest assured that an app is sandboxed (via the App Store or macOS Notarization) or choose to let it run anyway (on macOS.) A dev could notarize their game (or not) and distribute it through Steam or the App Store, or both.
If Steam and GoG etc. could sign apps, then you're back to having multiple authorities of varying trustworthiness.
• Will third-parties have the same standards for checking if an app uses only the authorized APIs and gating privacy/resource access?
• What happens when Apple/Google introduce new OS APIs, will those third-party signing authorities update their standards at the same time?
• What if a third-party goes rogue and starts signing malicious apps? How and how soon will we know?
You get to choose who the third parties are, so choose ones who do. Some of them may even have higher standards than the platforms do.
> What happens when Apple/Google introduce new OS APIs, will those third-party signing authorities update their standards at the same time?
This was solved decades ago. You introduce new APIs with new operating system versions and provide development releases to developers ahead of time so they're ready by the time the new system is released to the general public.
> What if a third-party goes rogue and starts signing malicious apps? How and how soon will we know?
Presumably the same way you know when Google or Apple does it.
Even major companies still haven't implemented something as trivial as Dark Mode in all of their apps by now, I wouldn't count on them to keep up with more complex changes.
Google still hasn't implemented Picture-in-Picture on iPads. Others still don't support split-view multitasking. Both these features have been out for years.
The things you're listing are optional features. That doesn't require some kind of coordinated effort. If one distributor requires support for Dark Mode on day one and another gives developers a year and another never requires it at all, so what? If you really love Dark Mode you can decline to install apps from distributors who don't require it. Or just decline to install apps that don't have it, which you could do regardless of what any distributors allow.
You mean like open source developers?
No they haven't. Given a fair choice customers have opted for the alternative the vast majority of the time.
The walled garden models have only worked when companies have engaged in anti-competitive behaviour.
As in, Steam versus... Buying and downloading directly from the publishers' websites?
The Xbox and PlayStation stores? The Nintendo eShop?
Steam is the alternative where you get to choose where to install things from -- one of those places is Steam. Installing Steam doesn't prevent you from installing other software from the developer's website or the Linux package manager or Windows store or wherever you like.
Sadly people in general can't be trusted to make good decisions because of lack of knowledge and preference of short term gratification over long term well-being.
It's very hard to get that interpretation even after re-reading the OP's comment.
> Let this be another nail in the coffin of the "walled garden" farce.
There is no coffin, the walled gardens are not dying, and have long since become the norm, which happened because the people found them to be better than the alternative: getting apps (and manually updating them) from many different sources of varying quality and convenience.