It doesn't seem ridiculous to me, I get where you're coming from. Only I'd say you've been misled.
As others have pointed out, you can have both a walled garden store and an Apple curated store — and this is how Android operates. More menacing though, are Apples reasons for not wanting competition.
Put simply; if Safari wasn't the only allowed browser on iDevices (other browsers are just skins over what is essentially Safari), they would lose a significant amount of power. They can throw their weight around now, partially because they have a strong web browser market share — but it's artificially imposed.
If you don't think it's forced, have a quick quiz at work amongst Apple fanboys, and find out how many of them use Safari as their default web browser — on their Macs.
If there were other app stores besides Apple's for iDevices, Google would require you to download the Play Store to access Gmail, YouTube and Google Maps. Once there's an alternative major app store where Apple's strict privacy rules don't apply, why should companies with a more relaxed privacy stance stay on Apple's store? Your Bank, Facebook, Adobe, and Amazon will likely move to the store with the lowest standards.
Being on the default store is 1000% buff. Literally your Bank, Facebook, and Amazon aren't going to just disappear off the shelves of the biggest store. On Android, Amazon actually run their own app store and they still have all their apps on the play store.
Besides all of the trouble it takes to build and run one's own store, pulling one's apps off the official App Store would be hell for discoverability and UX. And the Amazon store really only exists for the sake of Fire tablets.
Ushering the FB app to a Meta store would still require a migration process that would be annoying at best and arduous at worst depending on the user. See what happened to the HBO Max to Max app rebrand this year, except with the additional headache of going to a new app store entirely.
That migration process is the discoverability issue, because now users would be forced to contend with yet another website, marketplace, account, etc.
When someone searches for the fictional new Facebook clone "Visagebook" in the Apple store you can bet they'll want to pay money for "Facebook" to show up somewhere in those results.
As others have pointed out, you can have both a walled garden store and an Apple curated store — and this is how Android operates. More menacing though, are Apples reasons for not wanting competition.
Put simply; if Safari wasn't the only allowed browser on iDevices (other browsers are just skins over what is essentially Safari), they would lose a significant amount of power. They can throw their weight around now, partially because they have a strong web browser market share — but it's artificially imposed.
If you don't think it's forced, have a quick quiz at work amongst Apple fanboys, and find out how many of them use Safari as their default web browser — on their Macs.