Except all of us who value privacy and security.
Face it: the major competition between app stores is not going to be on price, but a race to the bottom on who can allow apps to fuck over users the hardest.
Nobody would be going after Apple if they had simply stopped their monopoly pricing scheme.
Its too late for that now. Now Apple is going to be forced, under threat of government action, to stop its anti-competitive actions.
If there's one company I don't expect that from, it's Apple. They may have highly dubious ethics but they are damn good at business and marketing, and I would be utterly shocked if they don't position themselves as the safe, privacy-friendly official app store. For people who don't enable side-loading, I wouldn't expect they'll even notice any changes.
And I'm sure Facebook is anticipating not having to ask for permission to hoover up all your personal data. Sure you don't need facebook, but if you want to be using WhatsApp to communicate with your friends and family, you might not have a choice. Shady companies that sell shady spyware to schools "for the children" are looking forward to a much easier time rolling out the most invasive ideas they have. The ad companies are I'm sure salivating over telemetry libraries with extra detailed modes for non-Apple app store installations.
But most of all, I look at Android where alternative app stores are possible with essentially no cost, and even with Amazon's enormous resources behind it, they could not get an alternative app store to catch on. I can't think of any reason why it would be different on iOS, so ultimately I suppose I expect this to go nowhere and a few years from now there will be the epic game store and the main app store and everything for nearly everybody will just be on the app store like it is now. The alternative stores will just have the apps that Apple wouldn't approve, like porn apps or privacy invasive, etc
Considering this hasn't happened on Android yet, I doubt you are in real trouble. Like it's not that they can really gain extra permissions (other than I guess tracking anything the app already has access to, but that isn't any different than currently) because they are sandboxed by the OS and limited in access through the permission system... I HOPE? RIGHT? @APPLE
And on the side of other app stores: there is F-Droid which is decently popular for OSS apps.
As far as I can tell, Apple doesn't plan to let this happen.
