I agree with your desire to side-load. My only caveat I would apply to that is to put some super really scary warnings to the user (as they will be no longer within the security of the walled ecosystem). I don't want users to accidentally side-load something because someone told them to, and not be aware of the extra risk the are potentially introducing.

You mean like the message people get shown when the UAC comes up in Windows, which almost everbody clicks away?

Average people don't care. If you tell 'em to do so or so, they will do.

That's exactly how Android works.

you can already do that, you just have to build it yourself.

here’s an article from 2016: https://9to5mac.com/2016/03/27/how-to-create-free-apple-deve...

There's a limitation on the number of apps you can sideload (3), and each app auto-expires after a short period (7 days) of time and needs to be re-provisioned.