The App Store policies were always for the benefit of customers (and Apple). These policies will keep happening because the basic incentive of Apple's business model has been unchanged since 2008.
Priorities matter.
P.S. I do see Apple business model changing to services bringing in some bad behavior associated with that: for instance, push notifications now are used as a spam/marketing mechanism for Apple services similar to Android; iCloud Storage nag is another example.
The storage and other nags I hate, it's a real ethos breaker for me. Get that crap off my iphone. That's why I pay extra - for less crap (I like that they somehow can also block the carriers from installing unremovable apps, for some reason android phones sometimes come with weird apps from your carrier when you get them).
I remember when I discovered my Android phone wasn’t encrypted, and it had lasted for years. I suddenly stopped using it, changed my passwords/tokens and bought an iPhone. Never came back.
An extremely beneficial policy for the customers, right.
Oh, and of course you won't be able to use push notifications, because Apple.
edit: the apps expire after 1 week and need to be constantly reinstalled. This is abusing an exploit in apple's walled garden that will surely be "fixed".
The fact is that you are allowed to sign apps with a free dev account, the cert will just expire after a week.
AltStore’s been around since 2019, so they’ve had ample time to “fix” it.
Edit: they do not need to be reinstalled. With AltStore the cert update is automatic and wireless (your computer handles it and sends the updated cert to your phone). You will never notice their expiration, and never need to reinstall, unless you’re away from your computer for more than a week.
The point is as the device owner you have the ability to run code on your own device outside App Store without paying Apple. To be able to effectively distribute such code to the average iOS user who may not understand how to deploy unsigned app and the potential implications of it is a different story and one that you could argue is designed to protect the layperson against themselves (contrast this with users running random .exe from emails on Windows).
If Apple will allow third-party app stores or direct installation of applications on devices, dictatorships will lose this capability to harm Apple's customers.
But of course we all know that this policy was never intended to protect users, it was to protect Apple and their appstore monopoly, which also allows Apple to extort developers of 30% of all of their revenues by forcing them into Apple's payment services. Finally, the world has had enough of this and starts to fight back against it.
As someone who switched from the Samsung note line to iPhone, the only freedom I felt from the ability to install other apps was the freedom to deal with all the unrecoverable crap ware.
There’s other phones out there with greater freedom than the iPhone, people are aware of them, and are still choosing the iPhone.
The curation is a benefit in that I have a corporation with thousands of employees working to prevent the other corporations from making my user experience worse. If the curation goes away I’d probably switch to a cheaper phone next upgrade and I’m sure apples aware of that
Nowadays on Android I try to search for apps on F-Droid first or search on Github as a shortcut to find open source apps. Why open source? They are often a barebones version, that will probably not sell me out and will not use dark patterns (I know it can still happen). I have nothing against paying for apps, I do have a couple I bought, but sometimes I have simple itch, that I know for sure someone else already scratched for everyone else and I do donate sometimes. This lousy state of app stores leads me often to search for some simple web apps on github.io. At the same time I sold whole open source category to Microsoft. In the end it seems that all I want is a smartphone shell scripting equivalent, but that is a totally different point.
There isn't metadata for this, as it is not part of Apple's relationship.
They are a seller of software, and the creator of the software is responsible for making sure the software can be compatible with the licensing and copyright terms of both Apple and any dependencies.
A semantic link to grab the source code for an app would be neat, but a pretty niche feature. That Apple can't verify that it is the same code (or that the separately hosted build process doesn't have malicious logic within it) probably quickly pushed them over the edge in terms of not supporting such a feature.
The priorities have shown very clearly over time.