I see a lot of people downplaying the claimed downsides of “Meta/Google will just build their own app store and force you to use that” or that malware will proliferate via 3rd party app stores by saying “well nobody is going to make their own app store, it doesn’t really happen on android either”.

So if no 3rd parties are going to make their own app stores, why force Apple to provide the ability at all? It’s a huge engineering cost to do so.