Opening the walled garden doesn't simply add more choice. Here's one example, the Mac App Store. It's a ghost town. Even probably the most downloaded app ever, Chrome, isn't on it. If the iPhone allowed non-App-Store apps, you'd soon find yourself required to download each app from a random website. Which is fine on a Mac but not necessarily what people want on iPhones.
That’s not the argument you think it is. Chrome isn’t on the Mac App Store because it’s not compatible with Apple’s walled garden. So while you might need to go to a separate page to get Chrome on Mac, it can’t exist at all on iOS, and would have never had the opportunity to thrive in the first place if macOS originally started out as locked down as iOS.
I can personally guarantee you that people download Chrome because they want the sync, the UI, they have to in order to access work documents, etc. Not because it's running blink.
Play store is more permissive than App Store, so there's less reason for publishers to leave, but there's also more junk on it as a result. They can't act strict like Apple without fragmenting it.
Still, it's starting to. There are already multiple stores, Google Play and Samsung Galaxy at least. Fortnite for a while was only standalone from Epic's website (but is now on Samsung too).
More junk is fine. Here we are having a great discussion on the most permissive platform of all time. In spite of the amount of junk on the web, I wouldn't trade it for anything else. Sifting through "junk" is just a search and curation problem, and those problems have been solved for decades. Using multiple stores is no worse than using 15 different messaging apps, which we all seem to have no problem with, in spite of the walled garden utopian paradise imagined by some folks.
I'm guessing you're typing this on a PC. iPhones are all about quickness, not having the kitchen sink with you. Idk if most Android users care about the openness, but they have it.
It's all-around, but the ones I can name... Apple has some very particular rules about how you can direct users to external places to purchase things, which I don't think are present on Play Store. Also more strict about apps requesting permissions they don't make a strong case for needing. And rules about offensive content, and restrictions against apps they believe there are too many of. No game emulators allowed either. The ban on third-party iaps was pretty recent on Android, like 2022.
For instance:
- I made a simple news-sharing app. App Store pushed back against me a few times about the offensive content policy and reporting mechanism not being up to their standards. I never heard back from the Play Store, they just OK'd it the first time.
- I made a college-only dating app. App Store said they won't allow any more dating apps that aren't different enough (mine wasn't), Play Store said ok.
- A startup I knew was making an NFT app with a beginner-friendly way to purchase using USD. Apple objected to purchases not going through IAPs. They escalated a bunch of times and eventually got it through. Play Store didn't care at all.
Apple enforces the rules that applications must only harvest data in the ways that they describe. That's behind Facebook's tantrum about the App Store.
Google said it would introduce an equivalent policy, but then backed off, and does not enforce it.
