The App Store was always a walled garden with notably tall walls. The power Apple has over who gets into the App Store has been described as the primary virtue and attraction of iOS devices for years. Users love that it is a curated collection with a very high bar for quality, and many are willing to accept the trade-off that not all apps (even technically legitimate ones) will be published there.
This is why the web is so important. More to the topic at hand: this is why Apple purposely, broadly second-classing the web on iOS is so important, and needs to stop.
On Android, a directory-style app would be trivial to distribute on the web as an installable PWA that eventually becomes indistinguishable from a native app from the user's perspective. It's 2020; this is a sub-basement level of capability that all platforms should include by now. Let's stop pretending that ceding all the publishing power to one company is a trade-off that makes sense in the long-run (this goes for Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and all the rest).