I usually find myself rolling my eyes when HN collectively complains about Apple, because the perspective is so dev-centric, completely ignoring the concerns of

I usually find myself rolling my eyes when HN collectively complains about Apple, because the perspective is so dev-centric, completely ignoring the concerns of the actual users. But this is a kick to @#&!s of users (and devs). Even you stipulate that the DMA is a horrible, terrible regulation that should never have been enacted, Apple still absolutely has to find a better way to comply than this. This isn't going to just piss off some whiney developers, but also hit their customers. I think this is a major screw-up by Apple that will have long term consequences for them. (BTW, we don't have to wonder if freely allowing "side-loading" will cause a security catastrophe, as Apple claims. We already know it won't. "side-loading" is just called "installing" on Mac OS, linux, windows, and various other OSs, and is being done all the time on those OSs now. Yes, it's not perfect and people get scammed/pwned/etc, but that's true of iOS anyway. Go ahead and make the apple store the only built-in one and make a scary prompt to do others and have your kill switches and other modern protections -- its a rather dumb straw man to pretend the alternative to the current system is literally nothing.)