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Why App Stores Exist And Many Developers Never Welcome Them
When you distribute your app, made over weeks with sweat and tears, the recommended way is to go through the operating system’s App Store. This can be the Apple App Store for macOS and iOS, the Google Play Store for Android, the Microsoft Store for Windows or the central repository of the user’s Linux distribution, such as Ubuntu’s Snap Store. Many developers don’t like any of them. Let’s explore how app stores came to be, what the technical reasons for them were and why developers don’t like them.
The alternative to app stores is what many refer to as . It describes the way of installing apps without using the official app stores by simply downloading the installation package and taking matters into your own hands, or that of the installer package. The term sideloading is relatively new, but the approach was the standard way of installing software just before 20 years ago. Many believe that the reasons for the move towards app stores are purely commercial, for the operating system vendor to extract as much value out of developers’ apps as spossible. Yet, there are technical reasons that made operating systems enforce app them.
Sideloading like it’s 1995
Those of you, who are as old as I am or even older, will remember the way we installed apps on Windows 3.1 or…
