Ask HN: What does an alternative to Play Store/Services need to be successful?

1 points by fgutmann 7 years ago | 3 comments

In the light of recent EU rulings and Google announcing that it would charge up to 40 € for the Google apps including Play Store for devices sold to Europe I was wondering what an alternative to Play Store / play services would need to be successful.

The ultimate goal is an alternative system that device makers would pre-install on devices sold to Europe.

Some random points on my mind to get started:

- It would need to be easy for developers to publish on play store and the new alternative with minimal extra effort. - Google takes 30% of all revenue from developers. There's potentially some leverage in this. - We'd need a proper alternative for Push Notifications.

- What are the most important features of your app that require play store / play services? - How to keep it trustworthy / secure? - What existing tools could we build upon? - How do we attract developers to publish on this store while we don't have widespread adoption yet?

jaclaz 7 years ago |

Do we really need a "store" (in the sense of a centralized and "controlled" repository of android apps? [0] [1]

I mean, set aside the Apple Store and the Google store (and the abomination that is the Windows store) all the rest (Linux and Windows before the latest) worked just fine downloading programs from the publishers.

[0] Where you can find tens or hundreds of similar and/or similarly named apps, mostly crap, or spin-offs, usually without a proper way to understand what the app actually does (or if it is the one which you actually want), if it works, etc., so that you have anyway to read online reviews, consult the publisher's site (if any) for reading the docs (if any), to have (if any) support, etc.

[1] and where the "store manager" can at any moment remove your app for whatever reasons (legitimate or not) ...

fgutmann 7 years ago | |

That's a very good point. However I think we need a replacement for some core components in play services at least.

For example it just makes a lot of sense from a technical point of view that multiple apps share the same connection for push notifications.

Artemix 7 years ago |

A good, and well-known, alternative market is F-Droid, which only contains FOSS apps.

This can be a good starting point