They do. MacOS isn't a walled garden.
> They're anti-competitive
Have you heard of this little company from Washington called Microsoft? They have something like 85% of the PC market. There is another OS called Linux. About 85-90% of the internet runs on it.
I can understand a little where people get the idea the iPhone is anti-competitive, but we're talking about MacOS here.
Ask Amphetamine about how open they are.
Amphetamine is a perfect example of how the Mac isn't a walled garden. They always had the option top sell outside the App Store. That is fundamentally the difference between what makes a platform a walled garden. They might have lost some sales because they couldn't participate in the Mac App Store, but they could still sell their product. Some companies choose to avoid the Mac App Store because they don't like Apple's policies.
That's neither here nor there.
(a) Amphetamine could still be sold outside the Mac App Store.
(b) An app name could be problematic even in FOSS land. It's just that instead of Amphetamine being the name that causes it, it will be something else. E.g. with the trend of banning/changing terms like "master" (as in replication primary master, not as in the owner of slaves), unfortunately named apps could be thrown out something or ask to be renamed to be included in a distros package manager or a project.
Remember the transition to arm64? Apple forced everything on the App Store to ship universal binaries.
Without the App Store walled garden, software isn’t required to keep up to date with architectural changes. Instead, keeping current is only a requirement to being featured on the App Store (which would just be a single way to install software, not the only method).
That said, all software on the Mac, post-Catalina, has to be 64-bit, whether it's distributed through the Mac App Store or not, because the 32-bit system libraries are no longer included at all.
Gates are not incompatible with walled gardens. Most walled gardens have those.
Plus, I mentioned the walled garden as a good thing. It's part of the Apple proposition (even if not alll get it), and part of what it enables it to move at the speed it does (whether in the right or wrong direction).
But one can susbstitute "walled garden" with "tight control of the OS, hardware and imposed requirements on most of third party software, and willingness to enforce hard schedules (e.g. regarding removing 32-bit, OpenGL, etc) to all (or tons) of its developers at once.
The walls in the walled garden only exist in the heads of people who never use a Mac.
With much slower adoption, pushback, and bike-shedding, like in the Microsoft and Linux world.
>To me, it suggests they aren't willing to compete.
Compete with what? With themselves? They compete with Windows (and to a degree Linux, though few care for that), and with Android. They'd compete with Windows Phone too if MS wasn't incompetent.
But they didn't do anything to preclude others from making their OS/hardware and selling it to customers. In fact, they have nowhere near a monopoly in either the desktop (10% or less) or the mobile space (40% or less).
Whereas MS for example, had 98% of the desktop (home and enterprise), and abused its power to threaten OEMs to do its bidding against Linux etc.