> If you are right and this makes things worse don't you think people will just stick with the Apple store?

No, they won’t. At a bare minimum, they’ll have the Google store and the Facebook store, and they’ll probably have a dozen others, because most people don’t actually care enough to make a principled stand on these kinds of things, but their lives will be shittier because of this, in the same way that we all have LinkedIn accounts even though LinkedIn is dogshit because we all need jobs and none of us care that much, but our lives are shittier because of LinkedIn and they’ll be shittier because of this.

> a bare minimum, they’ll have the Google store and the Facebook store

Why Google and FB in particular? Because of the ad tracking thing? Note that if Apple allows sideloading, then rather than installing G/FB’s official apps you’d be able to install 3rd-party clients to their services that mitigate tracking/block ads. Currently you can’t easily do this because of App Store policy disallowing apps that violate the ToS of services that they access.

Because Facebook and Google have the size, market power, and incentive to do it. They’re both mad at Apple over Apple’s privacy moves, they’ve got the engineering talent and scale to make it viable, and there’s not an apple device out there without at least one of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram or Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps. Hell, I’m as ornery as they come over this crap, but even I won’t use Apple Maps.

And, what’s to keep 3rd party clients from working? The same thing that currently does: Google and Facebook control their APIs. This isn’t the era of the open internet, and that doesn’t change with an open App Store either.

> This isn’t the era of the open internet, and that doesn’t change with an open App Store either

I wasn’t throwing out a hypothetical when offering 3rd party clients as a solution to installing Google or FB’s stores. This is already what’s happened on Android. Rather than download official apps from Google Play one can install a community app store (F-Droid) and grab enhanced 3rd party clients there.

API control is rarely an issue aside from the fact that these unofficial clients tend to use said APIs in ways that violate the provider’s terms of service. As such the client apps violate the Google Play Store’s rules and must be sideloaded. This rule is also why 3rd party clients must be sideloaded on iOS.

In other words, people will have more freedom, and with that comes the freedom to make bad choices.