Imagine if Microsoft would have shut down every external program on windows and charged every software developer 30% merely for running software on windows. That's the world of app stores and Apple and Google.

I have absolutely no idea why Microsoft is often hated, despite the fact that I can run whatever I want on my windows machine, compile software, download stuff from the internet, doesn't matter, and that's despite almost universal market share for decades.

Windows at the end of the day may be proprietary software and they've pulled their share of nonsense but Windows was pretty much always a genuine platform that lets you do what you want. The state of the smartphone market is unacceptable.