> For starters, the AppStore is not "good"
That is your opinion. There is no merit in this subjective standpoint from a legal perspective unless you're willing to share the metric by which you arrived at this judgement.

You brought up goodness with fast/good/cheap! And you certainly provided zero "metrics" in defense of its goodness, I at least provided my perspective as a customer with a concrete issue. I literally provided a specific metric, search quality, immediately following the sentence. You OTOH just take it as a given that the store is "good," unless your implication was that the AppStore is "fast and cheap but not good," but I doubt that's the point you were trying to make.

> I don't know what point you're making with this. We're in a thread literally discussing removing a freedom from Apple.

The point is you believe that Apple can ahead-of-time know the cheapest price for something. You posit that a competitor on the iPhone would be incapable of arriving at a lower price. And for the record, if you read my comments, I never say that Apple should be forced to allow this. I think they should do this because it would be better for them and for me the customer. I think they are silly to continue putting themselves in the ire of so many groups by being so obstinate about this product, but even separate from that, it would give them fantastic arguments in their relationships with developers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26796845

> Setting aside the obvious difference, how is this different than outlawing murder, except for one day of the year or in one city? Attention will suddenly be directed towards the less stringent alternative. You're just opening up the gates for a race to the bottom, something we've already had enough of IMO (and FWIW, I agree with you here: "I wish the AppStore was MUCH pickier about the apps it let in").

Yes, setting aside the obvious difference. I have provided a clear example. HKMap.live is an app that Apple took down to appease China. The AppStore creates a single point of failure for nations to target and cut off. Most people here think it was pretty shitty to remove that app while the citizens of Hong Kong were fighting for their voice. Maybe in your eyes that's the exact same thing as "The Purge" (I honestly can't believe this is where this conversation has devolved), but it isn't for me.

Here is a simpler example: Tor isn't on the Mac AppStore, but guess what, I can still get it on my Mac. And that's a good thing. I don't have the needs of a journalist abroad, but I'm glad they can safely surf the net even though I don't have those worries. I can understand why Apple doesn't want that front and center on the AppStore to put a target on their backs from countries like China. See, there's actually a lot of stuff that doesn't cleanly fall between good and "murder level bad". Hell, even just allowing FireFox with its own rendering engine is a clear example of a thing that most people don't think is akin to allowing porn onto the store, but that Apple nevertheless does not want on the store.

I frequently acknowledge that I probably would not use side-loading. I in fact would be someone that wants stricter rules on the store. I would actually like for Apple to boot every loot-box based game off the store for example. As far as I'm concerned, it's gambling that targets children. But I accept that that opinion is not shared by everyone, and thus I think we should have a system that allows for strict rules without also having them necessarily affect every single person, with the sole decision-maker being Tim Cook.

The other just ridiculously obvious difference is that I can opt-out of side-loading. No one is saying that every iPhone user should have to be forced to download every shady app on Earth from every second-tier AppStore. That's not the way it is on the Mac. It's so weird that you bring up Windows as the alternative to iOS rather than... the Mac, which seems like a much more obvious comparison point. I wonder if that's because the situation on the Mac isn't a catastrophic hellscape and thus doesn't serve sensationalist fear mongering.

As I said in that comment, side-loading would not have to be on by default, or even easily turned on. It could also warn you on every single app install that doesn't go through the AppStore (which would be awesome, but Apple obviously can't do this on their own AppStore because it goes against their narrative of the safety of the AppStore. Unfortunate, because if they did, it might actually help prevent a lot of these spam subscriptions. At least with out-of-the-AppStore downloads they could put super scary warnings every single time). In fact, it could even be disallowed with parental controls. There are a lot of obvious options in between "only the AppStore" and "MadMax dystopia where anything goes."