Most people are naive about how applications will coerce them into doing things against their best interest when given the ability, such as a request while installing, requesting access to parts of the system that reveal PII. Most people do not have the knowledge to evaluate how these things play out. Apple via the app store at least does some work to mitigate this and when they do fail, are able to fix it.
You are making the case for the app store to exist, not for it to have no competitors.
Let's suppose that Apple's store is infallible. Well then the availability of other stores won't matter, will it? Apple will approve everything good and reject everything bad and you'll know that anything not in their store is bad and have no reason to ever look at another store even if they exist.
But suppose they're not infallible. They reject something good when they ought not to. Well now you gain something from the other store, because now you have the option to install it anyway. You don't have to -- you only would if the other store has a sufficient reputation for not distributing bad things -- but you could. Or you could still continue to refuse anything not in Apple's store. It only gives you a choice.
And the existence of the choice creates competitive pressure. It makes it in Apple's interest to do a better job for you, because they don't want customers turning to other stores because they've rejected something they shouldn't have, or because they're charging monopoly rents to developers etc. So they spend more resources to reject only what's bad and not what's good. They charge lower fees, so that more money goes to developers and you get better apps. And then even if you still don't want to use the other stores, their existence makes Apple's store better for you.
I don't see this playing out on Android where other stores exist. And lets take this to the brick and mortar model. 30 ish% of the end user price is not a lot, when many products are at least 100% markup.
But first, we know the App store isn't infallible, but it has an incentive to have more false negatives than positives. It is able to correct past mistakes and does do so.
But as far as competitive pressure, that argument is mute as long as there is no way for the "normal" owner/user of a device to evaluate the market. By the time the bad actor is exposed, it is often too late. The other side is that one only has to look at the Play store to see that there are so many copies of original apps that it is obfuscating them. One cannot find the legitimate app. So until most people are able to be informed and evaluate the apps, it isn't in their favor to want alternative stores.
Also, one has a choice, buy or don't buy the device. Apple does not have a majority of sales in phones, not even close. Also, you can side load any softare you want. It's a service that is paid for , but for free it's 7 days per install.
There is a massive difference between 30% on sale price and 100% markup. The more important point is there is competition in regards to markup. The 30% is obligatory.
But the Play Store is a lot less likely to reject things it shouldn't, it doesn't try to extract a percentage of third party revenue from services like Spotify or Netflix, and there are useful and trustworthy third party stores like F-Droid. It's better.
> And lets take this to the brick and mortar model. 30 ish% of the end user price is not a lot, when many products are at least 100% markup.
Brick and mortar stores have expenses for in-town real estate and sales clerks that Apple doesn't, which is where that margin goes. It's unavoidable for that sales model, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing -- and it's the exact reason why online retailers like Amazon have been kicking their butts by cutting that margin down. And even they still have significant warehousing and shipping expenses for physical products that the digital products Apple distributes don't.
Margins like that are costs to be eliminated where possible, not excuses to impose the same costs where they don't otherwise even exist.
> It is able to correct past mistakes and does do so.
Right, so can you point me to the best BitTorrent app in Apple's store?
> But as far as competitive pressure, that argument is mute as long as there is no way for the "normal" owner/user of a device to evaluate the market.
If this were true then it wouldn't do you any good because then people would have no way to know not to buy an Android phone and enable a shady Russian app store full of malware. Fortunately it isn't (and people doing that is quite uncommon), because we have all the normal mechanisms to determine whether a store is trustworthy -- the reputation of the store operator, third party reviews, opinions from savvy relatives or your company's IT staff etc. And the store itself is still curated by the operator, so you only have to do this for the store operator when enabling one, not every individual app. And you would still have the option to use none but Apple's, if you like.
> The other side is that one only has to look at the Play store to see that there are so many copies of original apps that it is obfuscating them. One cannot find the legitimate app.
So the Play Store doesn't always do a great job. This is a pretty good argument that the level of competition there is pretty weak too -- other stores exist but not many people use them. Still, what stops Apple from doing better than that, competition or not? There is no consumer demand or competitive pressure to approve duplicate garbage apps that nobody actually wants, and Google only does it out of laziness.
> So until most people are able to be informed and evaluate the apps, it isn't in their favor to want alternative stores.
They still wouldn't be evaluating the other apps, only the other stores. It might be reasonable to consider F-Droid (and therefore the apps it distributes) trustworthy but not some store nobody has ever heard of operated by anonymous second world foreign nationals.
> Also, one has a choice, buy or don't buy the device.
That isn't a choice, it's more than one choice, anti-competitively required to be made together. I could want to use iOS on Apple hardware but install an app which is only in the Play Store, and that choice doesn't currently exist.
> Also, you can side load any softare you want. It's a service that is paid for , but for free it's 7 days per install.
This is obviously not a viable alternative or your entire premise would disintegrate because it would be a vector for malware, and then what's the point of excluding other app stores?
But why Mac OS still allows competent users to buypass the security restrictions? Is it because they can't screw over MacOS users ? Or for some reasons the people that use Mac OS can be trusted but when you give the same user an iPhone his IQ drops and we can't trust him.
Come on, let's be honest this is in the first place in Apple interest, if Apple needs to sell in China then they made sure they handed over Chinese users data to the government, now if they want to sell in EU they would need to also put a bit of effort into it(I have no idea if EU market is smaller but money is money)
