Your question could have been written 15 years ago about Internet Explorer vs Netscape Navigator.
It's mostly as a result of pre-bundling and commercial agreements. We've seen the gradual move away from AOSP to a situation where 'Google Play Services' becomes a closed-source dependency for almost every major Google App, together with their iron grip on device manufacturers to strong-arm its installation in exchange for access to their ecosystem.
At that point, Play Store is the default and most users wouldn't need/want/think about moving away from it.
But also.... ....just in case those naughty users did think about being unfaithful. There is a lot of ethically gray UX design that makes it harder for a third party App Store to gain as deep an integration into the OS, by raising the barrier.
For example, overly alarmist alerts relating to security / unknown sources. Your average techie might know what they're doing, but they're sufficiently scary for your mum to probably abandon her attempts to install that third party App Store and just use the default.
Comments
Your question could have been written 15 years ago about Internet Explorer vs Netscape Navigator.
It's mostly as a result of pre-bundling and commercial agreements. We've seen the gradual move away from AOSP to a situation where 'Google Play Services' becomes a closed-source dependency for almost every major Google App, together with their iron grip on device manufacturers to strong-arm its installation in exchange for access to their ecosystem.
At that point, Play Store is the default and most users wouldn't need/want/think about moving away from it.
But also.... ....just in case those naughty users did think about being unfaithful. There is a lot of ethically gray UX design that makes it harder for a third party App Store to gain as deep an integration into the OS, by raising the barrier.
For example, overly alarmist alerts relating to security / unknown sources. Your average techie might know what they're doing, but they're sufficiently scary for your mum to probably abandon her attempts to install that third party App Store and just use the default.