This reasoning presumes that consumers will see no advantage at all in staying in the Apple Appstore. If true, this would simply prove that the Apple Appstore is effectively uncompetitive in the market, and can only profit in a situation of monopoly.

But it doesn’t matter, because all this is effectively false in practice. The overwhelming majority of people can barely be bothered to change their desktop browser, and even then they mostly do it only when directed (by their IT or their power-user of reference). This idea that they will all suddenly go tweak-crazy and install every appstore under the sun is simply an exaggeration, a strawman propped up to defend Apple’s utterly anticompetitive practices.

“This reasoning presumes that consumers will see no advantage at all”

You’re going to need to explain this. I don’t see anything in what I wrote that leads to the conclusions in your first paragraph.

1. Users may not understand the security/privacy benefits until after they have sacrificed them.

2. There will be very large competitors trying to persuade them that there are no benefits. E.g. https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/16/22178068/facebook-apple-...

3. Alternate stores will pay for exclusives and users will be forced to use them or lose important apps.

4. Key apps such as Facebook itself will just build stores into their apps.

As to your second paragraph:

“The overwhelming majority of people can barely be bothered to change their desktop browser, and even then they mostly do it only when directed..”

This is true, which is precisely why only Facebook and Google plus Amazon and a few others, E.g. Epic, will have the resources to persuade users to establish large alternative stores. Google advertised Chrome on the front page, and on TV. This is exactly what would happen with alternative stores.

“This idea that they will all suddenly go tweak-crazy and install every appstore under the sun is simply an exaggeration..”

A strawman is when you present a deliberately weak version of another person’s argument, and then attack it. This paragraph of yours is a strawman. Nobody alluded to anyone going tweak crazy etc. Nobody defended Apple.

My comment was a response to this:

“People who want to stay safe in the Appstore garden have nothing to do, and everyone else can go the extra mile if they want to.“

Which is clearly an unrealistic depiction of how things would be.

> People will be persuaded to go out of the App Store ecosystem regardless of whether it is good for them or not.

This. We devs do a great/horrible enough job of this already being lazy with implementations and saying “Chrome is the only supported browser”