Sure, he may be looking out for Epic's interests, but that doesn't change the fact that these lawsuits Epic has been filing have been and will be benefiting all developers.
All companies just optimize for themselves, but Epic is currently the only real counterbalance to the Apple and Google duopoly, so regardless of what the motivation is, a side effect of it is that it benefits all customers and developers.
It benefits all developers, even the shady af ones. And No, it doesn’t benefit “all customers”. He wants to trade user safety for corporate profit. That’s fine for the CEO of a for profit company, but let’s not pretend he’s Robin Hood.
Earendil is correct that it won't benefit "all customers".
But I think you are both wrong that it will benefit "all developers".
It will certainly benefit some developers. Likely the ones it will benefit the most are the ones with redundant services to what Google (and Apple) are offering. Things like hosting services, payment services, international market support, marketing/ad systems, etc... Interestingly enough, these are not the small developers everyone seems to mention when talking about how "predatory" App Stores are.
The devs who might not benefit are the ones who are not paying the 30% fee. The ones that don't have sunk cost in infrastructure to support payments and mass marketing. They may find themselves in a situation they might loose customer exposure due to reduced/fractured traffic in specific App Stores. They may find themselves making multiple and varied agreements with several providers which will also mean maintaining those relationships, which takes time and energy and in some cases consultations with legal resources.
As a developer, there is some benefit to having a single distribution layer for your applications. For some developers that could be immensely helpful and for others it might not matter much. What we know for sure is that in the boxed software world developers often had teams of employees that work with specific retailers/stores. Mostly because each retailer/store operated differently.
Does that mean that in the near future when the utopian vision of 50,000+ App Stores being available per platform (because if competition is good, then more competition must be better), that each small developer is going to need to have a support team for each of those Stores. Maybe it means that, maybe it doesnt.
If we dismiss the App Store option and just go to everything being side loaded. Then some small developers are going to have to increase their outlay for tech support. Larger companies will likely be able to absorb this additional cost into their already large support systems. Unless there is some magic in side loading where nothing ever goes wrong.
There are a lot of "mays" and "mights" in this post. Mostly because, if we are honest about all of this, we don't "know" how it is going to impact the overall industry. Real experts acknowledge the uncertainty in all this. They acknowledge that an application market for iOS or Android doesn't have a direct analogous in history. People that are very confident in their assumptions and the related outcomes tend to be politicians or politicians pretending to be CEOs or other "experts".
The reality is that when you take more than 6 billion users and attempt to unify a solution, many problems are going to arise and you are going to fail at least several billion people. Even with macro segmentation of user interest you are going to have groups that value different aspects of any solution. Some users are going to prioritize simplicity, others security, others cost, experience, fairness (philosophical, market, opportunity, outcome, etc...), flexibility, inoperability, openness, closeness, or whatever X is that day.
