Better for you maybe, but not better for the average user who ended up with malware infecting their systems left and right because they weren't technical enough to avoid it.
Exactly. I have personally been on the receiving end of plenty of phone calls from users who had no idea they couldn't necessarily trust an application downloaded from a 3rd party site. "But it's the same application!" Sure it is, but who knows what else you're getting, even if it's as 'benign' as shitty toolbars. Has no one ever seen a parent/grandparents nightmare of toolbar hell in a browser window?
We did. And somehow the computer revolution still happened even though people actually had to learn a bit about how their tools worked.
Meanwhile in that crazy wild west the whole OSS infrastructure powering the most important global computer network was born. Tools, operating systems and software that isn't allowed to exist in app stores because they might be "dangerous" to the average user (whoever that is).
people actually had to learn a bit about how their tools worked.
They didn't, though; they just muddled through and asked their friends or some tech support service to reinstall Windows occasionally, when the viruses, adware and other crap made the computer too slow, or when the ramsomware encrypted all their files.
a) Educate users and give them more knowledge and better tools to easily protect themselves
or
b) Have app-stores organized in such a way that user interests and legitimate security concerns are not conflated with commercial interests of the platform owners as it's currently the case. Either treat app stores as a public utility with rights and regulations or require all devices to support competing stores.
You don't necessarily need a walled garden to solve that problem - package managers on Linux distribution do the same.
It needs the appropriate user experience for non-technical users.
