There's an inherent trade off here where adding safeguards to protect users will make the life of developers more difficult. Balancing these two concerns is hard.
I find that Apple mostly strikes the balance right, and so I choose to be their customer. People who disagree have other options available on the market today.
The argument that Apple provides more safeguards is a bit flimsy in my opinion. I honestly don't know what people think Apple is protecting them from, especially when Apple's own features have led to people being stalked (air tags).
Also, most iPhone users that I know tend to have bought their iPhone for cosmetic/style related reasons, or the camera. They don't seem to be all that privacy conscious, especially when their phone is loaded up with every social media app on the planet, including Tiktok!
We've not seen iOS ransomware yet.
https://www.wired.com/story/android-ransomware-worrying-evol...
Although we have seen things that impersonate iOS ransomware.
https://medium.com/macoclock/ransomware-on-ios-a-clever-tric...
Note that this is another area where you have this user vs. developer trade off.
- GPL or other copyleft licenses will put the user's rights above the developer's.
- MIT or BSD-style licenses will favor the developer rights above the end user's.
"open and unrestrictive as possible" is all relative depending on whether you are a user or a developer.
> The argument that Apple provides more safeguards is a bit flimsy in my opinion.
My point is that this is a market where people value different things. I value the safeguards Apple is putting in. I find they do a better job at it than their competition. But I fully understand that other people do not think so, or that they value other things more.
What I don't particularly like is some of these people turning to the State to force Apple to do things differently.
https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance
Maybe? Might have changed since then.
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9500/is-apple...
One could imagine that if the platform was opened to side-loading, the first third party app store to gain popularity would not be one from Meta or Google, but an F-Droid analogue for FOSS hobbyists and purists.