And also not require those apps to be also approved by Apple, which they are trying to do with AltStore and the DMA.
Users should be able to go to a dev's website, pay them directly, and download the ipa and install it with a click from the website. Having to go through any kind of "app store" at all should be optional.
The competition will find the most profitable process, not the one that serves customers best necessarily.
The biggest change the iPhone users are going to see an increase in spyware. They'll also notice in a few years a bunch of websites go Chrome only.
Why is that for one platform, everything needs to go through AppStore while the other it is OK - and both are equally secure?
Are you sure you're not falling for Apple's reality distortion field?
iPhones outnumber Macs something like 10:1. The user base tech literacy is lower on average. The usage habits are different.
The payoff for creating freemium and ad slop stuff on iOS is way higher.
Apple completely opens up the iOS platform. Do whatever you like.
Also, an XCode license is now $20,000/year. Don’t like it? Build your own.
And people will. That's how competition works. If someone thinks they can make a profit by offering a) better product b) same product at a cheaper price, you'll see investment.
VCs will be pouring money to capture that market.
And it will likely be much better too.
We would be back to the real days of computing.
Add a licensing fee for UIKit, Core Data, Core Text, Core Audio, Core Graphics, Metal, Network, SwiftUI, Quartz and all the other libraries apps use constantly.
Heck, why not for the OS itself? If you don't want to pay, they could conceivably dump you into an isolated VM and force you to write your own OS and userspace device drivers.
We used to pay for OSes and OS upgrades. Heck, you still have to pay for Windows.
The idea that devs owe Apple for use of their SDKs and API development is absurd. Apple already profits from it as people by their phones due to the amount of third party app support. See how Apple's profits go when WhatsApp, Instagram, Spotify, Netflix Uber, banking apps, are all no longer available on their devices.
What Apple really needs to do is mimic their old policy of no fees except for games. Let everyone develop for it, and then rug pull by making the fees apply to everything
But they can’t do it twice. So the Vision Pro ends up with no ecosystem
That's what people literally did, multiple times, for multiple systems, and did a much better job than encumbents
It's entirely possible to build apps to run on OSX without touching Apple tools .. except for notarization, which they force you to use.
Apple bans all such activities, has held the entire app ecosystem and seeks rent. If they think their offering is superior, then they should be OK competing. The fact that they have not opened it up says that they are happy to overcharge.
Remember, competition is always good. Let Stripe and Apple duke it out on payment processing, and let the best one win.
Let games me hosted both on Epic Store and App Store, and let users decide where to download it from.
That will be fair.