Following the recent takedown of the popular battle royale game, Fortnite from both the Google and Apple store, there has been rising speculation over the monopolistic nature of the app install market. In India, Paytm, an instant payment app was taken down by Google due to gambling policy violations and resorted back within a day.
Android and App store constitute almost the entire mobile OS space and host a combined 5 million apps as of 2020. Let's explore if such dominance in the mobile app space will continue for these players in the coming years
Alternate Mobile App Stores
It is important to understand the current alternatives to Duopoly that exist in the industry. Mobile manufacturing brands such as Samsung, Huawei and LG have their own mobile app stores pre-installed on devices The advantage of such stores is lesser competition as compared to Google and Apple mobile store. However, a major disadvantage faced is that a developer would be able to penetrate into only a certain demographic of users who own the brand's devices
Government Intervention
The U.S. Government has in recent times, has questioned the top 4 tech firms. The concerns revolve around monopoly, data privacy and surveillance capitalism. There have been apps by Chinese Developers taken down from Playstore due to privacy concerns in India. Similar concerns have been seen in the United States where Trump planned to ban Tiktok the most download non-gaming app as of May 2020.
Monopolistic nature of policies
The Google Developer Policy is owned and controlled by Google. As such there may tend to be a bias when decisions as made in regard to the decision of having a certain app listed on the play store. There has been concern over the 30% service fee Google and Apple chargers to developers for in-app purchases and subscriptions. The brunt of which the developers claim ends up being paid by the end-users.
Pre-installed apps
Companies such as Digital Turbine and IronSource, have been actively promoting pre-installed apps to developers. Pre-installed apps refer to apps which come installed along with the purchase of mobile devices. This would be an interesting business model to by-pass the app stores, however, there have been concerns over bloatware and lack of control it gives to users to decide which apps they want to be installed
While the mobile app store duopoly is going to exist for a few years ahead, there are several developers coming together, to fight back against the same. Only time will tell how the future of mobile app stores pans out to be. The usefulness of mobile apps cannot be undermined in the near present at least. Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
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