Indian Startups Explore Alliance and Alternative App Store To Fight Google's 'Monopoly' (techcrunch.com) 17
Google, which reaches more internet users than any other firm in India and commands 99% of the nation's smartphone market, has stumbled upon an odd challenge in the world's second-largest internet market: Scores of top local entrepreneurs. From a report: More than 150 startups and firms in India are working to form an alliance and toying with the idea of launching an app store to cut their reliance on Google, five people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The list of entrepreneurs includes high-profile names, such as Vijay Shekhar Sharma, co-founder and chief executive of Paytm (India's most valuable startup), Deep Kalra of travel ticketing firm MakeMyTrip, and executives from PolicyBazaar, RazorPay, and Sharechat. The growing list of founders expressed deep concerns about Google's "monopolistic" hold on India, home to one of the world's largest startup ecosystems, and discussed what they alleged was unfair and inconsistent enforcement of Play Store's guidelines in the country. Their effort comes days after a small group of firms including Epic Games, Spotify, Basecamp, Match Group, ProtonMail forged their own coalition to pressure Apple and Google to make changes to their marketplace rules. The conversations in India, which began in recent weeks, escalated on Tuesday after Google said that starting next year developers with an app on Google Play Store must give the company a cut of as much as 30% of several app-related payments. Dozens of executives "from nearly every top startup and firm" in India attended a call on Tuesday to discuss the way forward, some of the people said, requesting anonymity. A 30% cut to Google is simply unfeasible, people on the call unanimously agreed.
Why not just use FDroid? (Score:2)
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Not that I have huge hopes for this ... but you really want to invest a little in curation and heuristic development to detect malware for a third party store aimed at normal consumers. They can't take that kind of control over F-Droid.
Exactly. Lots of app stores, but they aren't safe (Score:2)
> Not that I have huge hopes for this ... but you really want to invest a little in curation and heuristic development to detect malware for a third party store aimed at normal consumers.
I think you got the nail in the head. There are a lot of third party app stores. I have to advise people not to use them because the percentage of malware and PUP is orders of magnitude higher than Google and Apple. Yet another app store has no value unless it's a *safe* place to get apps. So far, Google and Apple ar
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"Not that I have huge hopes for this ... but you really want to invest a little in curation and heuristic development to detect malware..."
Hopefully not the one that Google uses, they have to kill thousands of apps every couple of months that slipped through.
Just buy an iPhone already.
Re: Why not just use FDroid? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Aren't a lot of apps just re-jigged websites? In which case the open-source argument would be moot, right?
Also, phone and tablet manufacturers - why would they care which app stores their customers prefer, unless they have bundling agreements w/ any of them?
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Less is more (Score:2)
Re:Less is more (Score:4, Interesting)
I personally don't mind buying PC games on multiple different stores, I usually go with whatever gives the developers most money.
Re: Less is more (Score:2)
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Well, we see how it is in the iOS universe, where the only store that's there is Apple. So one only gets to put in apps that Apple approves of, for whatever reason. It's somewhat similar in the Play Store, where Google gets to determine whether one's allowed or not.
I get the quality argument you're putting out, but that's something that the market is more than capable of weeding out. Crappy stores will find themselves shunned very quickly, as word of mouth moves fast, particularly in India. In practic
Why? (Score:2)
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...Why reinventing the wheel, rather than investing on improving existing ones?...
One word: - Control.
Google monopoly != Apple Monopoly (Score:4, Informative)
This is why Google's app store monopoly is not the same as Apple's app store monopoly. Google has a virtually insurmountable lead with their app store and requires the app store to be pre-installed in order for phone manufacturers to get access to Google's important suite of apps like Maps and Gmail. BUT a competing company *CAN* produce an alternative app store.
With Apples's iOS no competing company can even attempt to take on Apple's app store.
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I wonder how Replicant is at the moment, and whether there are phone companies willing to bundle Replicant w/ their phones. That way, they can avoid putting in app stores that have only Google's or Apple's interests in mind. It gives non-Google app stores the opportunity to compete fairly, and the Play store wouldn't have to be preloaded. Also, for maps, they don't have to go w/ Google Maps: there are others. Similarly, they can put in any Email app and then have it automatically configure common mail s
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Phone companies (service providers and manufacturers) don't really have a good incentive to do this. Why would they? First of all, the vast majority of people are perfectly fine with Google's Play store. It has the biggest selection of apps, and Google's products really are very good. Second, Google provides all the maintenance and support.