But doing so wouldn't make that developer's software unusable on Windows.
I don't understand why you keep bringing up video game consoles in this discussion.
1. You seem to believe people actually agree with the way console stores work. This is not the case.
2. The fact that the situation is also terrible somewhere else doesn't absolve Apple of anything. That's not how justice works.
In fact, I see much much less vitriol aimed towards game console store policy than iOS App Store policy. That's why I mention it.
Pointedly, my argument is simple: the modern concept of plateform, as has been pushed by management consulting firms for the past two decades and successfully been exploited by hightech companies, is a blatant attack against anti competition laws and I believe the whole thing only started because the US government decided it would only meekly enforce them. Rebranding barriers to entry moats shouldn't make artificially building them more acceptable.
As you rightfully pointed, plateforms seem to be popping everywhere nowadays from game consoles to cars. I don't find that surprising: reducing competition is like crack cocaine to companies. It both means less need to innovate and differentiate and a larger share of customers surplus (theorically all customer surplus but it might be too blatant then). Customers are the ones losing there.
As the whole thing strongly goes against one of the core tenant of modern capitalism, it seems obvious to me it is going to end with more regulations as soon as the political zeitgeist regarding economy will lean less towards extrem laissez-faire. Unless of course, we decide to go full-bore towards nineteenth century style capitalism...
That this is often not possible is stupid but also incredibly dangerous. Not by the standards of the evil Apple just did, but what even more malicious actors can do to you is they can run code on your device & you can't do anything about it.
It could be state actors pressuring the company making the think & or exploiting vulnerabilities in the closed source firmware running on it.
Not that it matters, but the Amazon app store has the worst policies IME.
https://www.filfre.net/2016/04/generation-nintendo/ ->
> In a landmark ruling against Tengen in March of 1991, Judge Fern Smith stated that Nintendo had the right to “exclude others” from the NES if they so chose, thus providing the legal soil on which many more walled gardens would be tilled in the years to come.
All walled gardens suck.
In the same way people love Apple.
https://it.nmu.edu/docs/allowing-third-party-applications-in...
Amazingly it then lets me run all the open source I want that I download from the internet but am too lazy to build myself.
1. Try to open the application. Get a window that says "APPLICATION can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer.", and below that, in a smaller and non-bold font, "Your security preferences allow installation of only apps from the App Store and identified developers." The window only has an "OK" button. (There is also a small "?" button in the lower left, which is present in lots of notification windows and presumably points to a generic help page.)
2. Open Security & Privacy in System Preferences. There is now, magically, a line in it saying "APPLICATION was blocked from opening because it is not from an identified developer", and an "Open Anyway" button.
I only discovered that workaround by accident. Before that, I believed that Mac OS had completely removed the option to run such applications. (As I recall, back when "Allow apps downloaded from: Anywhere" existed, if you did choose it, it would show some kind of warning and also revert itself after 30 days; it seemed obvious they wanted to remove the option entirely.)
I'm tempted to bring out the word "gaslighting" to describe this. Because that line about "Your security preferences allow ..." is in a context where it should be an explanation of why "APPLICATION can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer", yet your security preferences about apps have only two choices and neither one would permit opening the application; and because a System Preferences pane now shows different options depending on what unrelated user applications you've opened recently, which is insane.
... Turns out there is a second, faster workaround. Right-click (or control-click) on the application, and click "Open". Then, instead of getting the liar window with only the "OK" button, you get a window that has an "Open Anyway" button. This workaround is, in fact, documented in the generic help page that the liar window's "?" button points to. This is also insane because it makes "Open" in its different forms (double-click, command-O, command-line "open", and the right-click "Open" option) no longer a single, uniform operation.
I suspect there are corporate users who have policies that forbid running non-notarized software. That probably shouldn't apply to a game like Fortnite—most companies wouldn't consider it important, or perhaps even a positive, for their employees to be able to run Fortnite on their company laptops—but it would apply to other apps.
Surely this comes down to what reasonable expectations are held by the customer. There are microcontrollers you can buy that require a soldering iron and USB breakout board in order to run your own software on them. I think that's pretty reasonable, but it would be a ridiculous requirement for a desktop PC purchased at Best Buy.
The question becomes: what are the reasonable expectations for installing third-party software on an iPhone. Personally, I think the overwhelming majority of iPhone owners expect and even highly value the fact that Apple (supposedly [0]) vets all third-party software on the iPhone, and it's generally more difficult to accidentally install malware or break your device than it is on other computing platforms.
[0] As I've said before, I think Apple actually needs to be more restrictive, because a lot of useless/broken/scammy stuff makes it into the App Store.
Apple changed behavior on that at least twice. (I skipped several Mac OS versions, so I may have missed intermediate changes.) First, it switched to requiring you to choose, in security preferences, an option to allow apps from anywhere—which, I think, would show a scary warning, and would also revert itself to the default after 30 days. Later, it switched to removing that "Anywhere" option, and instead shows a misleading "you can't open this because of your preferences" error, and provides a couple of insane hidden workarounds. I consider the first change reasonable, if unnecessarily annoying; I consider the second change unreasonable.