As for the Cydia store, that allows apps to to run on jailbroken phones, I.e. with security protections removed.
It should be obvious why users want to buy a platform that is as secure as Apple can make it.
And yes, the Cydia store is for jailbroken phones because that's the only way to load your own software onto your phone, but there are plenty of useful apps on there that aren't security issues and are only there to get around app store restrictions.
Apple doesn't have to restrict which apps I run to keep it secure. They do just fine securing MacOS, which allows one to install whatever they want.
Perhaps it’s simply not true that Apple pulls the plug on apps at any time.
Billions of dollars paid to developers suggest that you are just wrong about that.
I personally have had updates rejected, and then simply resolved the issues and resubmitted.
It’s simply false to say that apps are just pulled at any time.
You have allowed a few voices on hacker news to give you a false impression.
And to make sure it can be used with all existing libraries web sites and all opacs, you can enter any url and an xpath expressions, and then it runs the xpath expressions each day and shows the result as list of books.
And since I wrote it 15 years ago, there were no tech libraries for headless browsers available. So I wrote half of my own browser, and an XPath interpreter. (Modern XPath is actually Turing-complete, and with the EXPath file module, it can read and write to any file)
So, if the store does not allow custom browsers or Python interpreters, those are two reasons it would not allow my app.
Often the ideas about restrictions are simply false beliefs.
The OP said - headless browser, I.e: network and parsing the Dom, but not rendering.
Perfectly allowed. Please stop saying otherwise.
This is a jawbreaker of hyperbole around a chewy gum center of truth.
Although I have been thinking about making a JIT. Building on for x86 is easy enough, but then it is useless for ARM. I would not want to build two JITs. Or four with 32/64-bits.