alt Hacker News[flagged]
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> 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.
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.)
It's my understanding that the majority of people who want alternative app stores for iOS don't necessarily want something like an Amazon App Store, but rather something like F-Droid.
I would love to be able to install weird, open source apps on my iPhone, the same way I could on my Android phones.
Totally agree, but unfortunately people (forgive and) forget and that's why those companies keep on doing this.
I myself forgot Microsoft once (cough) sold e-books.
I don't follow this logic. Amazon did something bad on their app store so now walled gardens are good?
Or when Microsoft closed their music store.
If I want to spin up a CI/CD pipeline to build an Android app that takes 30 seconds. I send you or anyone else the link and you can test it out.
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.