Nintendo should be forced to allow homebrew games/sideloading. These locked down bits of hardware are a disservice to society.

I understand this question, but I believe an eshop is different from a major platform used by hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis to run their lives.

It is possible that some of those people would list "only one app store & gateway for digital payments" as a feature for which they bought devices based on that platform. I'd list lots of the things devs complain about on iOS as reasons I favor it as an end user, in fact. (for the record, I've also done iOS and Android dev)

They're not perfect at all and I wish very much that they had competition, but for me to consider it real competition with the product they're providing it'd have to be similarly locked-down. The locking-down is part of the value. There are already far-less-locked-down phones and tablets available for people who want that.

Lock it down by default, but allow users to unlock it. Make it a bit hard, like the carrier-lock. You have your walled garden and I have my device.

I’m totally cool with that provided it’s not easy enough that another App Store is able to become a de facto necessity via that install method. The current official side-loading methods are almost good enough to suit the case of power users running a few custom apps from outside the store. If there’s a way to take off the time limits and not open up the possibility of the above scenario, that’d be wonderful. I have a couple non-App Store apps I’d put on mine, in fact.

Isn't Fortnite just some game?

Fortnite is a game, but the lawsuit only uses Fornite as a concrete example of what Apple is doing. Epic Games if fighting for everyone--all app developers and ios users.

Much harder, but it wouldn't surprise me if the do later, depending on how this goes.