<story><title>Fortnite seems to have been removed from the Play Store as well</title><url>https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.epicgames.fortnite&amp;hl=en_US</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>&amp;gt; Same for me, I don’t want 5 blasted stores on my iPhone. I want one store and run by someone I trust.&lt;p&gt;The individual stores thing is actually really annoying.  If you play games on Windows you&amp;#x27;re familiar with this situation.  They all want to run 24&amp;#x2F;7 and cram their UI in your face at every opportunity, and you just want to play that publisher&amp;#x27;s one game.  They are trying to become chat apps, and web browsers, and it&amp;#x27;s just crazy.  I think my computer will explode if it sees one more web page wrapped in a &amp;quot;start at login&amp;quot; script claiming to be an &amp;quot;app store&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;game launcher&amp;quot;.  (Why can&amp;#x27;t these things just let me &amp;quot;chocolatey install&amp;quot; them?  I know how to keep Windows apps up to date.  Just accept my credit card number from inside the app.  Or, horrors, a web page.)&lt;p&gt;On Windows, the underlying cause of this is &amp;quot;because we can&amp;quot;.  Everyone that wants a game will install an app store to get it from without thinking, because the one Microsoft offers is too limited.  (They don&amp;#x27;t use Steam because it&amp;#x27;s run by a direct competitor, and Steam games kind of have that feeling like there are 3 good games in there next to 100,000,000 &amp;quot;I downloaded Unity this weekend, give me money!&amp;quot; games.)&lt;p&gt;Where I&amp;#x27;m going with this rant is that unlimited freedom is the worst form of app distribution -- except for all the others.  (I guess I have zero qualms with &amp;quot;go get&amp;quot;.  It works 100% of the time.  Apps can&amp;#x27;t explode files all over my computer.  Google provides a CDN for free.)</text></item><item><author>simonh</author><text>Android has a plethora of app stores, there have always been tons of them. Some phones have shipped with three or more, one from Google, one from the phone manufacturer and one from the network. Then you could add another one from Amazon, etc, etc.&lt;p&gt;Google Play Store won out on Android simply because the multitude of stores was a nightmare for customers. They don’t want multiple stores, they want one store on this phone, that will also be on their next phone. Any ‘monopoly’ wasn’t seized by Google, it was pushed eagerly on them by customers craving consolidation and simplicity.&lt;p&gt;Same for me, I don’t want 5 blasted stores on my iPhone. I want one store and run by someone I trust. The same goes for my Switch too, I’m quite happy for Nintendo to run the store for it. If I don’t like how they run it, I’ll get a PS 5 or XBOX. That’s where the competition is. I have plenty of choices thanks.</text></item><item><author>blunte</author><text>Good.  The sooner a big well-funded company hits this duopoly wall, the better.  They will have the resources to fight this, and the outcome will hopefully be positive for all other developers.&lt;p&gt;Apple and Google are gatekeepers to all mobile devices (practically), but the value they add as gatekeepers is questionable.  Certainly there is some value in their delivery (and much lesser so, their security) service; but their fees are not market set (since they are effectively monopolies by device type).  If there were actual competitors, their rates would be much lower... around 2-5% probably.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Waterluvian</author><text>It sounds like the real complaint is “the store needs to be running to use software I purchased from it.”&lt;p&gt;Which is much worse than the mobile environment. But you could still have more choice and not require the store to be running to use.&lt;p&gt;Imagine being able to go to epic games website and click “download game” and get a phone pop up “do you want to install X?”&lt;p&gt;There’s positively no need for a “store” at all.</text></comment>
<story><title>Fortnite seems to have been removed from the Play Store as well</title><url>https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.epicgames.fortnite&amp;hl=en_US</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>&amp;gt; Same for me, I don’t want 5 blasted stores on my iPhone. I want one store and run by someone I trust.&lt;p&gt;The individual stores thing is actually really annoying.  If you play games on Windows you&amp;#x27;re familiar with this situation.  They all want to run 24&amp;#x2F;7 and cram their UI in your face at every opportunity, and you just want to play that publisher&amp;#x27;s one game.  They are trying to become chat apps, and web browsers, and it&amp;#x27;s just crazy.  I think my computer will explode if it sees one more web page wrapped in a &amp;quot;start at login&amp;quot; script claiming to be an &amp;quot;app store&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;game launcher&amp;quot;.  (Why can&amp;#x27;t these things just let me &amp;quot;chocolatey install&amp;quot; them?  I know how to keep Windows apps up to date.  Just accept my credit card number from inside the app.  Or, horrors, a web page.)&lt;p&gt;On Windows, the underlying cause of this is &amp;quot;because we can&amp;quot;.  Everyone that wants a game will install an app store to get it from without thinking, because the one Microsoft offers is too limited.  (They don&amp;#x27;t use Steam because it&amp;#x27;s run by a direct competitor, and Steam games kind of have that feeling like there are 3 good games in there next to 100,000,000 &amp;quot;I downloaded Unity this weekend, give me money!&amp;quot; games.)&lt;p&gt;Where I&amp;#x27;m going with this rant is that unlimited freedom is the worst form of app distribution -- except for all the others.  (I guess I have zero qualms with &amp;quot;go get&amp;quot;.  It works 100% of the time.  Apps can&amp;#x27;t explode files all over my computer.  Google provides a CDN for free.)</text></item><item><author>simonh</author><text>Android has a plethora of app stores, there have always been tons of them. Some phones have shipped with three or more, one from Google, one from the phone manufacturer and one from the network. Then you could add another one from Amazon, etc, etc.&lt;p&gt;Google Play Store won out on Android simply because the multitude of stores was a nightmare for customers. They don’t want multiple stores, they want one store on this phone, that will also be on their next phone. Any ‘monopoly’ wasn’t seized by Google, it was pushed eagerly on them by customers craving consolidation and simplicity.&lt;p&gt;Same for me, I don’t want 5 blasted stores on my iPhone. I want one store and run by someone I trust. The same goes for my Switch too, I’m quite happy for Nintendo to run the store for it. If I don’t like how they run it, I’ll get a PS 5 or XBOX. That’s where the competition is. I have plenty of choices thanks.</text></item><item><author>blunte</author><text>Good.  The sooner a big well-funded company hits this duopoly wall, the better.  They will have the resources to fight this, and the outcome will hopefully be positive for all other developers.&lt;p&gt;Apple and Google are gatekeepers to all mobile devices (practically), but the value they add as gatekeepers is questionable.  Certainly there is some value in their delivery (and much lesser so, their security) service; but their fees are not market set (since they are effectively monopolies by device type).  If there were actual competitors, their rates would be much lower... around 2-5% probably.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jchw</author><text>I agree 100%, although I will give Steam some credit: when it launched it was universally maligned, but with enough work it became probably the digital storefront people are most loyal to, and for some justifiable reasons; and it passes the most important test: many prefer it to piracy.&lt;p&gt;Go get is weird. I guess it’s still federated even with GOPROXY as a middleman, but I am still not sure how I feel about all of it. It makes sense from the perspective of ensuring things don’t maliciously break, but it feels less obvious what it’s doing than I’d hope, and that probably makes many uneasy.</text></comment>