A thriving market in marijuana has existed your entire life. It works exactly this way.
Countless examples. PC hardware. Vaping. Yelp.
It's fine. Which is lucky: who watches the watchers?
You want real-time feedback without perverse incentives. Only customers can provide it.
Much like a government can create quality standards and then outsource parts of its missions to private sector.
Then don't use those other apps stores.
I think that people who care about all this stuff, can very easily just continue to use the Apple app store.
Well, because Apple's behavior is illegally anti-competitive, and it is possible for everyone to get what they want.
You can simply not install other app stores, and other people can get what they want, if Apple is forced to allow other people to install other app stores, because their illegal anti-competitive behavior is stopped.
You should not care, if other people install whatever they want, on the phone that they own.
Because you can simply choose to not use those app stores. Problem solved, and everyone wins.
> The status quo should remain
Actually, a better solution is for Apple's illegally anti-competitive behavior to be stopped, by allowing other people to install what they want on the iPhone if they choose to do so.
Imagine if there were 10 inspection groups, but sometimes they get bought by corrupt investors who let standards slide while pocketing the extra profit, and consumers constantly have to stay on top of which food inspection groups are the current OK ones and which aren't, and restaurants can't afford to get inspected by all 10 so they only do 2 but then people who only trust another 2 won't go there at all even though the food's fine, meanwhile the most trustworthy group jacks up prices for restaurants like crazy because restaurants know they have no choice...
It would be a nightmare. There's a reason that literally no country does this, that food safety is virtually universally considered to be a basic function of modern government.