Apple has earned plenty of criticism themselves, but I do appreciate that they curate the app store with humans.
For iOS your users will have to sign it themselves (but still via Apple, who could block that too) with their own developer account, just to get a time-limited install. Or, even worse, use a jailbroken device to work around all this.
If Android were really as free and open as everyone says it is, then there would be a method built into the os to download and install apps directly through the web browser, without hunting through settings and enabling it.
As it is, this is barely better than iOS, and I’m kind of disgusted that everyone thinks it’s fine and normal as a solution.
On top of that, if you have a rooted phone, you can use F-Droid to automatically install updates. For me updating apps from F-Droid is actually more convenient than updating apps from the play store, which I have to manually install.
There absolutely could be phone vendors selling LineageOS phones with F-Droid as the default app store. The only really important thing that would be missing for a lot of people would be WhatsApp.
On Android you just grab an APK or use F-Droid and it's a couple taps.
Like legit it’s like the inverse of wading through the comments section on macrumors.
If you actually do care about privacy and free speech and aren't using an iPhone because they're fashionable in your country then you should check out purism and pine64. They're the only phones I know of that are designed not to run "mobile OSes".
As for an alternative mobile OS, I would love to get my hands on Sailfish, but it’s not available for the US.
