The amount of busywork app stores create for developers in this day and age is absolutely insane. The bureaucracy has long surpassed government agencies.

You used to be able to check two boxes, pay 25$ and publish any apps. Now you get this crap several times a year with nothing changing from your side. They must have dedicated departments that keep inventing new ways to fuck with you.

And from the user side, the search is basically unusable. It's almost like they forgot that the whole idea behind app stores was to be slightly more convenient than installing apps by downloading them from the developer's website. Same as Netflix forgot that its main selling point was to be slightly more convenient than piracy.

Yes, there's also the billing and the whole reach thing, but most apps are free and gain their user base thanks to the developer's own marketing efforts, so the app store itself is reduced to a fancy hosting service. So at this point, I don't understand why we as a society keep using them as the default way to distribute and download apps.

@grishka The default software is not the choice of "we as a society", it is the choice of device manufacturers who have a hard time refusing Google's GMS license offer, as the open source part of Android is tiny and not really an usable complete smartphone OS. Teach your family and friends F-Droid and LineageOS.