The point of this is so that there is the possibility of escaping that walled garden, arguably welcoming more users into the ecosystem.
Nothing would change for you. Just like android users can keep using all things Google, they have the possibility of installing apps from other sources.
So, you see, it doesn’t matter whether Apple has the walled garden or the third-party devs have the walled garden. Either way, users will be forced to accept someone’s distribution policy. But the difference really lies in the trust on Apple and its security and privacy practices, which is a choice that will be robbed from people buying iPhones to use apps exactly for this purpose.
Would they? I imagine they would distribute via all available, at different price points. At least that's what I would do. Why would I want to forgo access to customers who prefer every last detail to be handled via Apple's infrastructure?
That said, if there were actually a dichotomy between "force developers to distribute via my preferred means" and "permit developers to choose whether or not to use my platform of choice" the former seems obviously immoral and the latter obviously the correct course of action. Why should you get to dictate how developers must do things? That's simply valuing your own preference over everyone else's (both developers and users) right to choose.
There are many other possible scenarios: devs forcing users to authenticate with unsecure methods, gather and unsecurely store credit card information, gather passwords, upload contacts, read SMSes, etc. The value that a third-party dev can derive from private user info is far greater than alternately offering a different version of the app that will pass App Store reviews.
If the goal is to make Apple open up their platform in a way that doesn't take away choices from users, we need a set of rules to guarantee that. Otherwise I agree with rTX5CMRXIfFG. Facebook and Google would find ways to gradually make the App Store more and more unattractive until that choice no longer exists. There would be billions of dollars worth of incentives.
In EU the only legal way to do tracking is opt in, so this is a matter of law enforcement and not a long term competitive advantage.
The weakness of regulation is a problem of American users, which they can solve by voting for politicians who support better consumer protection. Of course they may choose otherwise and choose instead a quasi-monopoly of more expensive walled gardens. After all, America is democracy, isn’t it? :)
EU newspapers routinely make users choose between accepting tracking and buying a subscription. Apple does not allow that.
Anyway, what the EU does is sort of beside the point as the App Store issue is global and lawsuit that Proton joined was filed in California.
If my apps are changing, yes it is changing for me.
Right now I can manage all of my app subscriptions from the Subscriptions screen in the Settings app of my devices. If they open up to other payment methods, my subscriptions are no longer centralized, I have to give my credit card information to more parties of variable trustworthiness, I have to worry about subscription renewal policies for every individual app, I have to figure out different methods of cancelling which could be a more difficult process than hitting "cancel" and trusting Apple will stop the payments, etc.
but we cannot have these until the lock in is removed
Whenever I want a subscription I want inside an app, I actually take the effort to go to their website and buy it from them directly, because it's cheaper (not that they're allowed to tell me this in their app though).
When I want to stop paying for the subscription, I cancel it and I'm done. At least in the EU, this is always an easy thing to do.
We need to craft legislation saying software vendors have to support some kind of standardized payment system with easy cancellation built in to it rather than relying on Apples good will.
I often find it strange that a country that is so advanced in many ways is so backwards when it comes to banking.
Recent versions of iOS have specific anti-jailbreak mechanisms (anti-downgrade mechanisms, ephemeral root filesystems) which don't provide general security, so they're sort of cheating. These mechanisms just mean it's harder to use the vulnerabilities for good, without significantly stymieing evil. (And they aren't wholly effective, seeing as 16.6.1 contains all of them, and it's still got a semi-untethered jailbreak.)
If apple is incompetent and makes it less secure, I'm sure they'll fix it.
Are you saying that Qubes OS is less secure than iOS?