Epic could market the device at first to their own customers, many of whom are kids who don’t need banking apps.
Network effects are strong, but not impossible to overcome. All they need to do is sell the device to users who don’t care about banking apps for long enough for banking apps to be uploaded to their store.
As for the the deal with OnePlus and LG. I don’t believe it was anything like what I am suggesting - that was just a co-marketing effort.
They weren’t going to create a new and open platform based on Android.
The argument that nobody can ever compete against Android no matter what they do is a weak one.
The iPod was an incredibly niche device when it was launched.
There is a proven market for handheld gaming platforms that don’t run banking apps. Epic could start there and build out, just like Apple did.
They could create a device targeting kids with games, nice controls and everything but it would just be another kind of PSVita at the end with Sony and Nintendo as competitors... It would never be a device competing in the mobile app market.
So yeah, they could do that but it would be pointless.
That's not what defines the mobile app market, what makes the mobile app market is that the device can replace a computer. Even if you could put a SIM card into a Nintendo Switch, that would still just be a Nintendo Switch.
Please refrain from breaking the site guidelines by complaining about good faith.
Are you saying that nobody can ever successfully sell a handheld gaming device again?
People in fact do buy handheld devices that play games, and there is no reason Epic cannot enter the handheld gaming market.
If they can sell a handheld gaming device, they can make that device cellular, and they can add an App Store. People won’t buy it as a phone or to run app initially, but if they sell it successfully as a gaming device, they can use that success to attract more apps to the store.
> People in fact do buy handheld devices that play games
But do people buy devices exclusively for playing handheld games? The 3DS is now officially out of production (and hadn’t had first party games in years, IIRC) and the Vita has been dead for longer. That leaves the Nintendo Switch, and while the Lite does exclusively play games in handheld mode, it plays the entire library of Switch games, including ones that were originally only designed for home consoles. And Nintendo created the dedicated gaming handheld market and was the uninterrupted leader and as often as not %70+ marketshare monopoly ever since Gunpei Yokoi made the Game&Watch AFAIK.
I don’t see why Epic couldn’t create their own gaming focussed device, and buy a bunch of exclusive titles including their own content.
If their store had better terms than Play, and accepted APKs, why wouldn’t other developers want to sell through it?
If the argument is that developers are desperate for better terms, it must follow that they would want to support a store which provided them.