I have a clear memory that, at the time, cellphone carriers were adamant about strictly controlling how their networks were used. If anything but voice or SMS crossed their network, they wanted to be bribed to permit it. The surprising coup was Apple getting them to admit a device with such flexibility onto their network.

Then Google finished the job; side-loading was no longer "jailbreaking", it was directly supported, and programming on the device wasn't prohibited. I'm not the customer for an iPhone, I really doubt they'd ever open up so that iPhone owners could install an open source app store (f-droid), and from that a full development environment (termux), within which you can install a bigger distro (Debian) to install e.g. Calibre for ebook-reformatting. Or git, or LaTeX, or rust, or emacs.