Right now you can choose an open platform, where Google, Facebook and Epic do what they want, or a closed platform that forces them to play by certain rules regarding privacy and whatnot.
The moment you allow direct installs of the apps, all the big players will remove themselves from the store and prepare a versions with looser privacy standards (FB & Google), or ones that show you popups for other stuff and use processing power in the background (Epic).
Yeah, also war is peace and ignorance is strength.
People should be allowed to make “bad” decisions, if they can’t it’s not really freedom.
Anyway, you're presuming that people would have a choice
The only reason Facebook and Google are going to have to get permission to not track you on iOS is the App Store. If they could circumvent the App Store you bet they would and the first thing to go would be those pesky privacy protections.
I don't want to give my CC info to a half dozen different companies with worse data security records than Apple, but suddenly every app will require me to install another "App Store", so suddenly my choices become "share my info with dozens of companies that can sell it" vs "don't install any software"
That's such a great choice you've given me.
No, deliberately saying the opposite of reality does not make it so. More freedom will result in people being able to enjoy more freedom.
Giving more freedon to monopolists like Google or Facebook will result in less freedom to people that have to rely on those monopolies.