These are very good points. My loosely connected thoughts on this:
We originally accepted this from Apple, because we didn't consider phones as "real" computing devices.
Apple would get in a lot of trouble, with no apologist left to defend them, if they turned MacOS into an app-store-only platform.
I feel like the major benefit of app-store for consumers is the curation of "good actors". What would be the consequences of adware if the protected app stores were let loose? On one hand I fear it would go completely off the rails, on the other hand it is already worse today on mobile apps than on PC/mac-apps, so can it really get worse? Would better access to opensource apps help alleviate the adware problem?
We originally accepted this from Apple, because we didn't consider phones as "real" computing devices.
Apple would get in a lot of trouble, with no apologist left to defend them, if they turned MacOS into an app-store-only platform.
I feel like the major benefit of app-store for consumers is the curation of "good actors". What would be the consequences of adware if the protected app stores were let loose? On one hand I fear it would go completely off the rails, on the other hand it is already worse today on mobile apps than on PC/mac-apps, so can it really get worse? Would better access to opensource apps help alleviate the adware problem?