* It makes my life as a developer much easier. I only have one App Store to aim at, and with a few hiccups here and there from inexperienced or overzealous reviewers the guidelines are pretty clear. If I had to design for half a dozen or more apps I'd have that many more versions of guidelines to worry about.
* I don't need to worry nearly as much about scam or knock-off apps siphoning off users, since Apple is proactive about that. Not perfect, but very proactive.
Those are just two off the top of my head. There are more, but I'm getting hungry.
Phones, consoles, tablets are closed because the companies that build them didn’t have competition from open platforms. Computers are still open because they still have competition, if they didn’t they’d likely all be chrome books.
I know it’s sort of hypocritical, but the walled-garden is only nice until it’s curators considers your needs to be weeds.
It's pretty nice to be able to build entire Swift playgrounds on your iPad, then share them with your Mac/MacBook. The IDE is simple and very straightforward, and it's useful for prototyping things on your iPad or iPad Pro.
You could always get an android.
I realise that this can come off as silly, but what, id not the walled garden differentiate the two systems? If you tear those walls down, you’re basically using a really expensive android device with all the tracking and malware that includes.
I do think the courts should force Apple to open up. Closed systems are evil, even though they are very nice to use. I just hope they do it in such a way that it’s optional and has no effect on the rest of us.