And what happens at the end of the 3 years? If apps are pulled, are people who downloaded the apps through those alt-stores going to lose access to updates, causing security issues or a support nightmare when the users don't see new features?
We'll see Android users needing to have multiple app stores just to get all the apps they want/need, along with the updates. From a user experience point of view, that sounds worse, even if the competition is meant to make things better.
Are devs going to be forced to support all the app stores too?
Will they need to go through N separate registrations, N separate support processes?
I can see a good number of devs going “eeuuuggghhhhh” and just letting an app rot, just only publishing to one store, rules-be damned, or just going to iOS.
Will devs be forced to make accounts on all the stores in order to collect earnings from sales on that store? Are stores opt in or opt out from a developer pov?
Google can’t force them to use Google for payments anymore. Maybe the multiple stores will force developers to integrate their own payment processing that can be used across all the stores, because it won’t be tied to any of them.
We'll see Android users needing to have multiple app stores just to get all the apps they want/need, along with the updates. From a user experience point of view, that sounds worse, even if the competition is meant to make things better.