You raise some valid points, but I believe your comparison isn't quite complete/holistic. > If you are a solo app developer, you will now have to keep presence

You raise some valid points, but I believe your comparison isn't quite complete/holistic. > If you are a solo app developer, you will now have to keep presence on all app stores out there, since if you don’t publish on one then a copycat will. This doesn't make much sense. The App Store will still be where 90%+ apps are installed from, and I'm willing to bet money on that. Where are all the Google Play devs pushing their apps on the Amazon store or on 3rd party app stores? > Furthermore, I believe you will have much less protection against plain piracy, which was a big thing in the days of yore until it was spectacularly dealt with by Apple within its mobile ecosystem. Depending on your familiarity you already had lots of such websites (I'm not going to mention any names but it's easily googleable if anyone wants to verify). Yes keeping the app for >7 days was a pain as they expire but a 3rd party altserver helps with that. > This is why I suspect the primary interests side-loading and alt app stores on Apple devices would satisfy is large enterprises and a few opportunistic middlemen. Have you taken a look at any of the privacy forums/subreddits? Places where they use say GrapheneOS? Do you know what's their favorite app store? It's this thing called F-droid. And it only contains open source apps. Such a move would be amazing for open source devs. Hell, it would be great for beginner/hobbyist devs too. I (ages ago) had tried my hand at android dev. And unlike iOS, you don't need to pay $99 to appease the Apple gods for that. Free publishing is great for indie and small devs who may never hit $99/yr revenue. Btw, afaik you already needed to pay a higher price for youtube premium if subscribing through the app. And apple's draconian/benevolent-and-super-nice policies (/s) meant that you couldn't even tell your users to get it for cheaper from elsewhere. Would you like paying 30% of your income regardless of choice?