I'm looking forward to this, even if only to have an alternative Android store that doesn't take such an egregious fee. I just want the market forces to decide the cut, instead of the monopolies. The only thing left to fix is Apple's ridiculous "fee for not putting things on our store".
Hopefully someone will do this soon, if the Epic store isn't this (or is this for just games).
If you're on Android try installing the F-Droid app store, lots of open source apps are available on it (and Droid-ify is a good looking client for F-Droid if you want an app store UI with Material design)
I already have F-droid, Obtainium, etc, but these are pretty niche. It will be great to have something mass-market (not just for FOSS) that most consumers will have on their phones.
Amazon has had its App Store on Android for years. It was a good source of high quality apps given away for free for a while. If Epic does that too, consumers win.
"I just want the market forces to decide the cut, instead of the monopolies"
Ironically it is the fetish with free market economics that produces the monopolies. I wonder how many "techno optimist" libertarians are also cheering the fact that Apple has been forced by government regulation to allow competitors onto their platform.
> Ironically it is the fetish with free market economics that produces the monopolies.
Not really, it's the fetish with taking free market economics to the extreme. You can't really have a free market without regulation, though now we're getting in a GPL-vs-MIT-like argument of whether "free" means "without restrictions" or "with restrictions that ensure the desired outcomes are produced".
>> You can't really have a free market without regulation
The definition of a free market is one without government regulation. There is no such GPL-vs-MIT debate here. Perhaps you are thinking of the term “capitalism”?
> The definition of a free market is one without government regulation. There is no such GPL-vs-MIT debate here.
Actually, there is, because I was able to find several other definitions that include minimal government regulation. This is also how most of my friends and family use the term.
> Ironically it is the fetish with free market economics that produces the monopolies.
only when there's not sufficient regulations from cartel like behaviour. At the risk of invoking the no-real-scotsman fallacy, i would say that a real free market cannot support a monopoly, unless said monopoly is taking as thin a cut of the profit as possible (thus leaving no room for competition as the initial outlay of capital would not be worth it).
Hopefully someone will do this soon, if the Epic store isn't this (or is this for just games).