Maybe it has to do with the relative willingness of users to spend money on apps. Despite being a much smaller market, iPhone users as a group spend a lot more money than Android users. It just isn’t worth going to all that trouble to avoid the Play store.

Maybe it won’t, but the larger point is that some are demanding freedom by coercing others to do their bidding. Let free men make free choices.

So does Steam but Apple is the only one getting any flak for it. Turns out that running a global distribution network shipping billions of apps/updates daily, testing them, providing payment processing etc costs quite a bit of money.