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You make a good point, in the Android world you can manually install the Amazon Underground application and grant it the ability to install it's own apps. I don't believe there's a similar side-loading method on iOS, however: Apple has take steps to prevent this.

IMHO, I expect Microsoft to release a solution more like Apple's App Store and less like Google. Clearly, Epic Games' founder has the same concerns. He's also expressed concern with Microsoft only allowing something like Steam to be installed via side-loading, which he thinks provides a barrier to entry that is too high. I tend to agree, it's easy to slowly make side-loading more and more difficult as time goes on, or to make more and more critical APIs unavailable to non-UWP applications.




Steam is only available via sideloading now. You have to go to a website and download the installer and run it manually. This is how Windows has always worked. UWP will allow the same, but is simply a more secure application format which can't easily contain malware. The only difference is Microsoft now also offers an app store.




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