The EU took sideloading mainstream. It's only a matter of time before that becomes the norm.
You also need to consider the fact that Epic Games is big enough that they could have just used an exploit to sideload Fortnite back on the iPhone, and the lawsuit was basically PR to draw attention to the App Store's ambiguities. That in itself shows App Stores are slowly on their way out.
Linux is up to 5% of the desktop. Gog and Itch.io are DRM-free, and are slowly gaining ground against Steam. Fediverse networks are slowly gaining ground against traditional social media. Signal is more popular then ever.
There will always be lowest-common-denominator users, but there is clearly some demand for an alternative to the biggest 5 websites...
>There will always be lowest-common-denominator users,
Interesting play, calling 95% of users "lowest-common-denominator". Those silly, blabbering morons that don't understand that they should be running Bazzite on their Framework laptops instead of using evil evil sofware.
>there is clearly some demand for an alternative to the biggest 5 websites...
This demand doesn't pay, and also happens to be some of the most demanding, entitled users you'll have ever seen.
I wasn't intending to insult anyone, just to refer to most users as "people who don't want to think about the tools they use, and don't care about privacy". Which i think is true of most people. I never called anyone a moron, they just have different priorities.
Meanwhile, an Android app for some random banking or government thing will require an attested boot chain measured all the way down to the stage 0 ROM burned into the SOC. That's not to say the open ecosystem isn't better, but to say it's winning enough to guarantee sustained general purpose viability is simply untrue.
