Most of the apps on my Mac are from the App Store and I wish all of them were.

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).

You don't need a walled garden for that, a unified update api would suffice.

So much this. Linux distros with popular package managers offer official and 3rd party sources through one API. It's a dream compared to Windows and Mac IMO

Homebrew on macOS is nice though, both for installing tools as well as apps (homebrew cask [0]).

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[0]: https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/

I'd say that they are more than moderate failures. I've heard from many acquaintances who aren't as tech literate as myself that one of the major reasons they got rid of their iPhone was not being able to install applications from outside sources.

Myself, I would never want to trust anything centralized.

Clearly the iPhone is a massive failure and everyone is getting rid of theirs. In what country are you seeing this?

I never said it was a massive failure, but many people have switched over the years to some form of Android after getting fed up.

>>I'd say that they are more than moderate failures.

So... major failure? Is that what's in between moderate and massive?

If so, I'd love to have a major failure. :)

Meaning the central stores they attempt to force on us, not the devices themselves.

> Myself, I would never want to trust anything centralized.

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.

It enables competition, which keeps everyone honest. If Amazon had an app store which was known to be full of malware then people would stop trusting them, but when there is real competition they need that trust to make money, so they would put in more effort to prevent that. If you find that your platform's app store is full of malware today when there is no competition, what is your alternative? Throw away your phone? Never install any apps?

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.

> acquaintances who aren't as tech literate as myself that one of the major reasons they got rid of their iPhone was not being able to install applications from outside sources

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?

Which is why with every macOS and Windows release there is some small fine tuning to drive the herd into the sandboxing model.

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 sandbox isn't the problem.

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).

Which AAA games are web apps?

Kantai Collection ? ;-)

The ones being served by Stadia, xCloud, GeForce NOW and PS Now.

Plenty to choose from.

I don't know anybody nor recall seeing more than a handful of mentions online of anyone getting their playtime via those services.

The only demographic that matters in the long run is the youngest demographic, and that demographic is the most likely to own/use very underpowered hardware (Since they don't have their own money to spend on nicer hardware. Often they use hardware issued to them by their schools, or hand-me-down hardware from older siblings or their parents.) The specific implementations of Stadia/etc may not prove successful, but eventually I expect a service like this to overtake the alternatives for very young users, and subsequently, achieve dominance when those young users come to view those services as normal and familiar.

That's a pretty loose definition of a web app, but I agree that those services are pretty poor.

Well, one needs a browser to access them....

I guess I’m splitting hairs. At least these systems aren’t the only delivery method for games, but who knows what will happen in the future.