I feel like it might have been the right direction a few decades ago. There was a lot of shovel ware and crappy software that was produced. I think they had the right idea to lock down the software availability have better quality control.

It's very similar to video game companies in the late 80's/ early 90's. Atari had a big problem with really bad games, and people lost faith in the quality of games. Nintendo started giving their games the "Nintendo Seal of Approval" to prove to consumers that the games had been thoroughly checked for bugs and such.

I can see why Apple would take the same direction, but we've come a long way with software development, especially with the rise of open source development.

Every time I think their walled garden will hurt them, I end up at my parents trying to help them through various issues on their Android devices, which come from different vendors so it's all kind of different even between devices when it should be the same, and I realize that the walled garden has some really obvious benefits that the HN crowd is somehow uniquely unable to appreciate.

I don't think anyone here looks at this topic with a black and white lens. There are various pros and cons to each and usually for developers the cons of a walled garden outweighs the pros.

Apple has relied on closed software for 40 years.

They are now fast approaching the first trillion dollar company. When exactly is this approach going to stop working for them ? And what evidence is there that people are suddenly going to flock to open source software ?

I never mentioned open source software. I meant software made by other companies that don't lock you into their platform such as Google.