you're misrepresenting the point, the point people make is that apple curating apps on the app store is a good thing for user privacy and minimizing spyware, and that allowing sideloading or third-party app stores would immediately negate that as some of the biggest, most intrusive, and most socially-inescapeable apps (like facebook) would immediately demand they be sideloaded in order to escape the apple rules on permissions/user surveillance/etc.
nobody thinks apple is doing it because they're their friend. And they know apple is making money off it. Some people prefer having apps with limited, audited permissions over a more wild-west approach where you could install anything and apps could demand anything or prevent you from using the app.
(and if you don't that's fine, Android exists and no apple users mind that. Market choices are good, stop trying to shut down Apple's ability to provide a different experience.)
if you really really want to sideload an app on an apple phone, pay the $50 a year for a developer account and you can compile and sideload whatever you want. Same for xbox btw, you can run any UWP app on an Xbox if you have a developer account.
I'm sure microsoft would've made the same argument in their anti-trust case - you're free to "sideload" any browser you want, or just buy a mac.
Most apple users have almost zero-information in an economic sense. Market choices are being made when consumers are being segmented into very rigid, hard to leave, cultures like Apple and Google - on top of that Apple and partly google own much of the stores, they do all the marketing, and can wield considerable basically unchecked power over their users.
And also, your mum isn't going to be using third party app stores, that whole part of the argument is quite vacuous and is effectively a logical basis for Apple to have complete oversight of everything on the app. And if she did want to play fortnite, Apple obviously aren't doing this for the goodness of their customers because they only pulled the plug when fortnite did the payments itself - that's just rentseeking.
Microsoft is making exactly the same argument as Epic Games, in fact, but they're not racing to allow third-party app stores on the Xbox either. This is a one-way street, these companies want to sell locked-down hardware but be allowed onto their competitors' platforms.
Similarly Facebook runs similarly exclusive stores on their Oculus Quest platform, which they also argue they should not have to open up.
This is purely down to companies who themselves employ similarly locked-down stores, which they feel should not have to be similarly opened, wrapping themselves in the language of openness and using it to attack their competitors' business models while arguing they themselves should be excluded. They are not making a good-faith argument for openness, they are using the legal system to take down a competitor.
Frankly I have much less problem with Microsoft opening up, since we don't do day-to-day business on our game consoles. How about they go first, model for us how an ethical company is supposed to behave?
> And also, your mum isn't going to be using third party app stores,
Yeah, actually, she will, that is the point. If she wants to use Facebook, she will use a third-party app store (where the application is not subject to Apple's rules about permissions and datamining). This is an immediate race to the bottom, won't even be a year and the superior privacy of the Apple ecosystem will have been completely undermined.
Here's an example of Facebook encouraging people to sideload a developer-licensed application with enhanced permissions so they could bypass permissions and leech more data.
So this is not a theoretical problem, this is something that actually happens, and that Apple has had to push back on.
