As I said, they tried and failed because nobody downloaded it. I'm not sure why you're suddenly bringing Epic's motives into a comment chain about the desirability of sideloading though? Epic is obviously looking to skirt store fees and doesn't actually prefer to run their own store, but that has nothing to do with anything above in the chain.

The post is about Epic.

Do you think anyone would install alternative stores on iOS?

If so, Android is obviously an irrelevant comparison.

Epic clearly believes iOS is different from Android.

I don't think most people would. I think most sideloading would be by users making things that fall outside of what Apple allows on their store, like on Android. I see no coherent reason at all why things would be any different on iOS, and nobody has presented one here beyond just asserting the premise that it would be different, and I don't think "Epic believes it is" is a convincing argument.

> I don't think most people would.

Why wouldn’t Facebook just integrate a store into their App?

Why wouldn’t Google advertise their store in the search engine just as they did with Chrome? Why wouldn’t their store ship with an Android runtime?

Epic doesn’t just believe it would be different. They are prepared to invest millions of dollars.

All there of these are obvious and coherent reasons why it would be different.

These are not coherent reasons why it would be different, they are assertions that you think it would be. None of them even speak to any difference between the platforms.

Just saying that it will be isn't a reason. None of this has happened. Every attempt at doing this has failed horribly. Most users are not technically capable enough to even go about installing an alternative store.

Why, given that this has not happened in the case of the leading mobile platform, and in fact all attempts to even mildly break with the play store have been resounding failures, would iOS be any different?

Obviously you must not be aware that Android is not the leading platform in terms of app sales.

You say:

> Most users are not technically capable enough to even go about installing an alternative store.

This is obviously false. We know for sure that average users can install apps.

A store is just an app. Why would installing an alternate store be harder than installing any other app?

Why wouldn’t Facebook just integrate their store into their app?

> Obviously you must not be aware that Android is not the leading platform in terms of app sales.

Both are still in the range of tens of billions of dollars. If one is worthwhile the other is too. Android is also by far the leader in number of actual users, which is what matters most to companies like Facebook.

The sideloading process is harder than just installing an app. Most users do not know how to do it and have no interest in doing it.

Google does not allow third party app stores to be distributed via their app store, and I assume Apple would do the same.

> Google does not allow third party app stores to be distributed via their app store, and I assume Apple would do the same.

This seems like an unreasonable assumption.

Apple wouldn’t allow alternative app stores at all.

We’re talking about them being forced to allow them. I.e. it’s not Apples choice.

Why would anyone forcing Apple to allow alternative stores permit them to make it too difficult for regular users to do?