It's too simplistic and disingenuous to present it that way. Last month there was Fornite in the App Store and no option to sideload.
Right now I count 34 Adobe apps in the Apple's phone App Store. I'm very confident if this precedent is set Adobe will have their own app store and very likely will not have anything but a placeholder in Apple's App Store.
I want an iPhone primarily _because_ the App Store is the only place to get apps.
> which of course led to hundreds of fake and infected apps on the net, harming users.
> If you just want to play Fortnite on your iPhone and don't care about the App Store then the latter option is a better.
Not unless you get a Fortnite that has an ad at the bottom of the screen and ships as much PII as it can to some third-party company, or offers 2x v-bucks and steals CC info.
The app stores are facilitating that in a way though. They're keeping the users as dumb as possible and not making any effort to differentiate between legitimate or malicious apps that are sideloaded.
If it were a matter of going to epicgames.com, clicking "Install for Android", and confirming a prompt that says "You're about to install an app from epicgames.com", I think it would be a lot easier to train users to understand that.