The Cydia store was good and had amazing, high quality apps and tweaks, and the other two examples you mention are walled gardens curated by companies who have historically amplified bad actors rather than stifle them.
There is a need for curation, but I don't think Apple is qualified to perform the kind of curation that is best for consumers, it is both so loose as to permit an app store mostly filled with useless garbage, a great deal of which they promote on the "curated" home page ( to-do lists, mrbeast unity game, financial management tools that simply exist to bait consumers into enabling bank api access) and so tight as to stifle the creativity of those who think outside the narrow box of the monotony that is popular on their app store.
Curation is necessary and valuable, but distribution and curation aren't the same, and as the examples you cited, and Appls's app store reveal, the motivations of curator and distributor are in a fundamental tension between maximizing sales and improving the experience of the customer.
And as for the principle of being able, even to your own harm, to freely install the software you choose on your device, infants and the sick may need walls to keep them safe from winter, but if we build walls so high that those who would hunt cannot pass outside, and so strong that when spring comes we cannot tear them down, we shall all perish.
> "And as for the principle of being able, even to your own harm, to freely install the software you choose on your device, infants and the sick may need walls to keep them safe from winter, but if we build walls so high that those who would hunt cannot pass outside, and so strong that when spring comes we cannot tear them down, we shall all perish."
Oh pulleeease, you're a superior "hunter" to the "infants" who use vendor curated app stores? Can you hear yourself regurgitating this embarassing Alpha Male/Ayn Randian drivel? It's software not manliness gym-bro posturing world. The experience of picking quality software from the large volume of total software isn't "powerful hunter" it's panning for gold - sifting a ton of river silt for hopefully a few flecks of gold, or being a filtration feeding sea creature, swallowing litres of seawater for a few morsels of sustainance.
You have freedom with Android, Chromebook, PinePhone, Windows, Linux. You covet iPhone and macOS because they're so obviously better people will spend two, three, four times the money to avoid the alternatives but then you want to break them and make them as bad as the alternatives? What about the principle of being able to, even to your own harm, choose to buy and use a restricted, limited device? The freedom to avoid having to be a human spam-filter, the freedom to make and sell restricted devices that people can opt-in to buying?
Ayn Rand? LOL, play your comic book political fantasies to another crowd, there is no marketplace here. There are two companies that have behaved monopolistically, using illegal means to crush all competition, and now lay flat on their backs and shriek bloody murder when weak Western regulators even sniff at reminding them of what they need to do to at least maintain the illusion of a "fair" marketplace. And for the sake of.... what in your estimation is high quality curation? (TikTok, Candy Crush, Fruit Ninja) In what sense is having the same 5 timewasting apps on the homepage for over a decade curation? Don't you imagine that a 'curator' would promote a diverse array of the high quality content and tools that are available on their platform?
You seem incapable of conceiving of a way of life outside of that of the consumer, sitting around waiting for a bit of gold to fall into your hands. Others are out there trying to build things, some of which are interesting, and most of which are miserable failures. And in the world that I want to live in, and in the world that Western democracies have built empires on the promise of, individuals and collectives ought to be able to attempt to do so without having to crash into the infinite fields of iron gates erected by the ~12 megacorporations that collectively have a stranglehold on >90% of every market for >90% of goods.
I am not interested in whatever male fantasies of individual struggle that you are seeing projected onto the foreheads of others, we should not deny a generation their collective and individual rights to self-determination by failing to see that we've created a world where digital life is a prerequisite for living, and our governments have protected a small number of aristocrats set on binding the digital lives of human beings to enrich themselves.
There is a need for curation, but I don't think Apple is qualified to perform the kind of curation that is best for consumers, it is both so loose as to permit an app store mostly filled with useless garbage, a great deal of which they promote on the "curated" home page ( to-do lists, mrbeast unity game, financial management tools that simply exist to bait consumers into enabling bank api access) and so tight as to stifle the creativity of those who think outside the narrow box of the monotony that is popular on their app store.
Curation is necessary and valuable, but distribution and curation aren't the same, and as the examples you cited, and Appls's app store reveal, the motivations of curator and distributor are in a fundamental tension between maximizing sales and improving the experience of the customer.
And as for the principle of being able, even to your own harm, to freely install the software you choose on your device, infants and the sick may need walls to keep them safe from winter, but if we build walls so high that those who would hunt cannot pass outside, and so strong that when spring comes we cannot tear them down, we shall all perish.