“Apple’s hardware”?! Is it not the customer’s hardware? We aren’t talking the cloud here, these are devices that the individual customers have already paid for. Apple should have little say in how a customer wants to use their own hardware.

So, jailbreak it, and install your own Epic App Store.

But, as I pointed out in a sibling reply, this hardware, firmware, and OS is, practically speaking, not ours. No matter how much as we’d like it to be.

then there should a law which makes hardware and software I paid for - mine.

This is the mistake, as a developer I want my app to run on your hardware, and the hardware of millions of others, it hardware that you happen to have bought from apple, but it's no longer theirs, and if you want to run my app, and I want you to, that should be our choice, not Apples.

> your hardware

This is a problem that's bigger than Apple, and it's not a problem that will be solved by allowing more stores on the phone - it won't make it somehow "your" hardware.

You can blame Apple for doing this with their phone all you want, but you're fighting against the tide with a shovel. It's an industry standard to lock hardware down to the point where they'd rather the hardware be bricked (the Nintendo Switch and its hardware fuses) than run "libre" software on it.