Mayne then we would have PWAs that work the same way everywhere.
The existence of competition might even motivate Apple themselves to adopting new video codecs and image formats that weren’t invented inside of Apple Hq.
The plaintiff here is a developer, not a fan of any specific device.
"Just don't develop for the phone, then."
Great, who's going to pay out the lost sales?
Also, assuming I "just don't buy an Apple device," I can [legally] develop an app on my Windows or Linux device?
Only Google?[1]
In addition, there's a very steep slippery slope in use here. It is currently possible to sideload on Android, and has been since day one, and yet we don't see the kind of end result you have predicted.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/06/apple-hulu-special-api-...
Had third party app stores/sideloading been allowed to happen as epic demanded, that would have made it impossible for any app sufficiently large enough to demand it from their users.
The risk here was very much a return to the Google/FB “gift cards for root access” scheme, minus the gift cards of course, if they had prevailed they would have just blocked web access to iOS and just demanded you root yourself for them if you want to use their service.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...