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I'm not familiar with this space (new to Android), could someone explain why there hasn't been additional "app stores" appear that people can use?

It's coming soon. Android have been pushed to accept third-party app stores.

There have been, but most non-technical users don't care or don't go through the hassle of using them.

Is there any that I should be looking into?

F-droid is the biggest one

Check out droidify or neo store for a better front end to f-droid

I use Foxy Droid.

It's unfortunate the official f-droid client is an unusable mess. (I stopped using it years ago, maybe they fixed it.)

There's also f-droid classic, can't remember why I use foxy droid over it.

The Huawei AppGallery is hundreds of times bigger.