With Apple I need to beg for my dev account to be approved, pay 100$ a year, and submit it via test flight.
If more than X numbers of people use it , ohh no I have to publish it via the app store. If it pleases King Cook, may I publish a game for my friends to play.
Google is starting to restrict Android too, custom system roms aren't as popular anymore, but theirs still a sense it's my phone.
With Apple, it's still Apple's phone, you've just purchased a revokable license to use it in accordance with the terms you agreed to.
This happens just the same on iOS when Apple drops support for a device. First-party stores are not a defense against this. It's theoretically easier to plan for, but you're still at the mercy of Apple's support window.
Once upon a time you could download an app and it would work indefinitely, but that's not the way any modern app-store based systems really work. What Amazon is doing here is probably less impactful than when Apple kills certain APIs and breaks a bunch of apps with an update. (I'm certain Amazon and Apple both do estimated math about the number of devices/apps/users they're breaking, and I'm also certain just based on volume that Amazon is breaking fewer people/apps with this change than Apple does routinely.)
I would love to be able to install weird, open source apps on my iPhone, the same way I could on my Android phones.
I myself forgot Microsoft once (cough) sold e-books.
However, Amazon did at one point in time sell ebooks in multiple formats pre-Kindle, one of which was Microsoft Reader. (I assume the others were PDF and Mobipocket.) So they have form for closing up shop and killing access to purchases like this.
No, the logic is that several large companies (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) have done bad things on their app store, so no stores can be trusted. But for me, I trust a big name store more than I trust an small unknown store.
Yes. That's why I listed it right next to Apple and Microsoft in my response.
Yeah I could get mauled by a bear if I get my fruits from the wild. But that's probably not a risk with the vendor from a neighboring town.
And if there's a fruit I can only get from the wild, who are you to tell me I can't have it? Maybe I get mauled by a bear. Maybe I get robbed in the neighboring town. But what else am I to do when what I want isn't available at the local marketplace?
This is why I ignore people who hit their "walled garden" macro every time an Apple thread appears on HN. I just don't trust alt stores.
Sure, choice is a great thing. But if you want to dump lots of money into some random "app store" run by who-knows-who in who-knows-where for who-knows-how-long? Go for it. Not me.
It's bad enough that I've had at least a dozen apps disappear from my iDevices over the years because the companies running them went out of business, pivoted, exited, or otherwise disappeared or stopped supporting their product. The last thing I want is for an entire app store's worth of apps to suddenly go away.
You can't even trust the big companies, let alone the little ones. Remember when Microsoft closed its e-book store?