> Remember dealing with distributors and middlemen before the App Store?

Uhhh.. remember hosting fees, payment processors, ad networks?

Yeah - it was vastly more difficult to deal with that patchwork than just uploading to the App Store, and the friction for consumers meant much worse sales performance.

This is false, and tons of software providers do it already today.

For smaller shops in an open market, they'll be a ton of vendors willing to do the 'full stack' checkout experience for a fraction of what Apple/Google charge.

For one, Shopify will open up a 'Software Goods' version of their front end to manage digital inventory and that's that.

$20/month.

> For smaller shops in an open market, they'll be a ton of vendors willing to do the 'full stack' checkout experience for a fraction of what Apple/Google charge.

I suppose they also provide the ecosystem of devices and the extremely valuable higher-income market segment Apple targets.

This is not false.

Presumably Shopify will do nothing to scan the software for malware, build a privacy framework, deal with incremental downloading of content, etc. etc.

The App Store is not just a bunch of urls with a paywall in front of it.