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> I think a lot of people are overlooking the value that the App Store and the iOS platform as whole provides.

The value would be obvious if an alternative was available to contrast with.

The alternatives are all the other platforms that allow third-party app installations/stores, such as Windows, Android and OSX, all of which have a huge problem with malware.

Just because Windows gives the flexibility to do anything you want doesn't mean you have to. You can set up a non-admin account with access to the Windows Store and it works very similar to iOS in terms of getting malware. The only difference is that if you run into something that Microsoft doesn't like or something that's too complex to run within the confines of the store requirements you can enter the admin password and install it anyway.

Curation is just letting someone else be your admin and you only get a normal user account. I don't have a problem with that, but I also don't think it's unreasonable for developers to charge those users +43% to recoup the costs of paying Apple to be their admin.

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