There’s little difference between a software company staffing a small porting/parity team, and a retail product company staffing special AR and buyer management teams to deal with large distributors.
Those don't fit in your comparison here. While Google Play might be seen as the only way, there is nothing to stop you from going to some other store (F-Droid e.g). Also you are not forced as a developer to go Steam or Epic. You could just offer a download from your website. Also, at least with Steam and Epic you can generate keys that you can sell outside of those stores in which you keep 100%. That's choice.
> While Google Play might be seen as the only way, there is nothing to stop you from going to some other store (F-Droid e.g).
Over upcoming releases of AOSP, Google intends to disable sideloading in Android, except for that tiny tech audience who knows how to enable developer mode and install over the command line. So, both direct APK downloads and F-Droid will be accessible to fewer ordinary Android users than is already the case. Definitely not enough people to build an app business on.
> Over upcoming releases of AOSP, Google intends to disable sideloading in Android, except for that tiny tech audience who knows how to enable developer mode and install over the command line.
If you define “what your software is” so precisely that it must be running on iOS to count as your software, then sure, by definition your software can’t exist on Google Play. But that’s just as ludicrous as manufacturing shirts and defining “what your product is” as “shirts being sold at Walmart,” then complaining that you cannot by definition sell your shirts at Target because they would no longer be your shirts.
I mean, it's not unreasonable to say that "my software" = My binary that is running on a device.
With android, I can have an .apk that is distributed via the play store or I can have that exact same .apk distributed via any other store that exists for that device.
