Well, ignoring for the moment that there's always some controversy with regards to contributions to Debian and other Linux distributions, Debian doesn't have an

Well, ignoring for the moment that there's always some controversy with regards to contributions to Debian and other Linux distributions, Debian doesn't have an app store. If there is software you can't get using apt-get out of the box, for example, if you want the real firefox and not iceweasel, you might need to add a repository to your config file. Or maybe just wget a url and install a .deb file manually. Or you can just download the source and compile it yourself. Can't do any of that on the iPhone. It's the app store or you figure out some way to beat Apple's security.