You can always install custom apps on Android and Valve is only one of many stores, so I'm not sure they really come under control at all...
Super Admin’s first action: delete other super admins!
I'm disgusted at how we transform such fantastic things as personal computer and turn them into such limited object.
No newspaper has published every single letter anyone sends to the editor without using some discretion.
But the main point is that it's the newspaper's own editor, following the newspaper's own editorial line (and possibly the law)
The fact of the matter is that everything is gatekept. If you want something done right (as in, not subject to someone else's rules), do it yourself, and you'll find you too will gatekeep after you've spent the considerable effort required to build your own device/OS/appstore ecosystem and social media service, and then someone comes along and tries to tell you how you should run things.
Don't forget about the most important part: putting what you wrote in front of millions of peoples' eyeballs. No pen/notebook company does that. And if they did, you're not entitled to the vast amount of labor that entails.
The labor resources would ideally be reduced by only doing hosting, and to check if the deployed app doesn't contains a malware, not on whether the app follows the guidelines created by some assholes in California.
By example, I'm completely creeped by Apple's relations to pornography, and how that impact apps such as Grindr. I'm creeped by the article's suggestion that Apple may remove the Twitter app "to protect" it's user from seeing Alex Jones content. In the same way, I wouldn't want my chinese-made phone to "protect" me from political opinion unsavory to peoples in Beijing.
That is why I really prefer the web vision of just deploying stuff on a domain you own, with a server you rent, and importantly no such thing as a whitelist of accepted domains curated by the browser maintainers. Of course even then there are limits to the kind of thing you can put in there, but nowhere near as much as those done on App stores.
I'm french, and despite both being western countries, there's enough cultural differences between France and the US to make me really despise any attempt at content control by platforms who I believe should stay culturally neutral; instead I just see people having accepted this level of cultural influence as being normal, even beneficial.