> I think it would still poison the “Apple experience” to have many AppStores all competing with their own closed ecosystems.

I actually think Apple could find a way to navigate it. They already allow one prominent alternative choice on iOS: non-iMessage SMS. If Apple allowed third-party stores, I could see them using their product, UX, and branding mastery to create the equivalent of the blue-bubble and green-bubble dichotomy for App Store vs. 3rd party downloaded apps. Creating a social stigma without technical restrictions, so to speak. So allowing an alternative while at the same time encouraging users not to partake in it.

I don't understand how a social stigma would work for sideloading apps. It works for iMessage because it's a social product. But how would anyone else even know if the apps on your phone were sideloaded or not?

Apple could easily put in UX to identify the apps as not from the App Store, similar to how green text bubbles signify non-iMessage messages. The very fact that the color differentiation exists has led to a bifurcation in texting, which has been discussed elsewhere, as in here:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ugh-green-bubbles-apples-imessa...

Apple is good at social psychology through product design, and it's not hard to imagine them employing similar methods to single out non-App Store apps on the phone to make them seem suspect for being less official. Less technically-savvy users will shy away from third party apps and sideloading if Apple's UI makes those apps seem scary. Thus, this can be a means for Apple to allow additional freedom while deterring most users from pursuing it, minimizing their potential exposure to third party insecurity.

The bifurcation isn’t caused by the colour of the bubbles. The colour doesn’t cause the stigma. The colours are simply used as a simple headline to represent all the differences and improvements that iMessage brings compared to traditional SMS/MMS.

The costs of someone not participating in the “blue bubble ecosystem” are borne by all of the people trying to participate in the conversation. Unless the cost of my friend side loading an app is felt by me, the same stigma approach is unlikely to occur.

Ironically, Game Center could have been that exact thing for gaming on iOS, if only they hadn’t mostly killed it off already.

The colors are an important signifier of the second-class status of non-iMessage texts, though. So if there were similar UX around non-sideloaded apps, whether differently-formatted text or warning labels, they could also shape user attitudes towards those apps.

To some extent you can already see this on desktop, when MacOS warns you about programs from unidentified developers and so forth.

That’s a good point, I could see it happening, even if it wasn’t social - merely an association with “green” apps being more buggy and annoying to use.

I don’t care for iMessage particularly but I do know when it’s blue bubbles I have a lot more capabilities.

How does it matter which policy the app store have in ease of providing support? Providing support in Windows (can't talk for Android) isn't hard at all.

Apps in the Apple App Store must meet usability and standardization guidelines, and are deeply integrated into the OS. As a simple example that came up recently, all the payments on the phone go through Apple, so the payment process is the same cross ecosystem. While that is a point of discussion in the monopoly debate, it’s undeniably a simpler experience on the user side - and that translates to easy support. I don’t have to consider it it’s stripe or PayPal or freedompay or anything else when mom calls and wants help buying premium, payments just work.

With an open app ecosystem all guarantees of standardization or not using private APIs or (ideally) the app has been somewhat vetted are out the window.