Hello! This is an idea I had that I don’t think anyone else has thought of yet, considering I can’t find anything similar through a DuckDuckGo search. Simply put, why not decentralize the app store?
Taking inspiration from how the Matrix protocol works, there are three types of nodes: Clients, who want applications, Merchants, who have applications, and Markets, which facilitate the entire process. In comparison to Matrix, a Merchant is equivalent to a homeserver, and a Market is equivalent to an identity server, but with more responsibilities. I don’t think I need to explain what a client is equivalent to (hint: its the same thing).
How the actual protocol works on a technical level is still up for debate, but only two pieces of software would be absolutely necessary: the Merchant server software and the Market server software. The Market software would handle accounts for Clients, as well as payments. There would probably be options for revenue share – either no share (dev gets all the profit from their app), share what you want (dev chooses how much they want to share with Markets), or fixed share (Market sets their take, limited to 50% and under) – since server hosting is not exactly free. The Merchant software would allow for developers to host applications, as well as multiple versions of the same application (i.e. Linux packages, Mac binaries, Windows binaries, Android APKs / x86 binaries, ARM binaries, RISC-V binaries). For share-what-you-want Markets, the dev chooses how much to share through the Merchant software. There could (and probably will be) client software as well, but it would be possible for the Market to have a web interface (through HTTPS) for Clients to use if they don’t want to use client software.
While this does at least appear to be a complicated system, it has one great benefit: you only need to have one account on one Market and you can access any application on any Merchant, and platform holders don’t need to host all the infrastructure necessary to support a large app store – they just need to host a Market server, add a compatible Client app to their platform, and any developer with compatible binaries on their Merchant server is now on your platform. Easy. Of course, it does mean offloading some of this infrastructure to the developers, but better to spread the burden around and make it easier for everyone than to put everything on one person or group.
That is all I can really say at the moment, as the idea is not fully developed, but I think this could be “very, very, interesting”. But what do you think? There should be comments under this post, but if you wish, I have a contact form on my about page which allows you to email me.
(Oh, and of course the protocol would be open source. Why wouldn’t it be? Just need to decide on a license – MIT, GPL, or something else?)
