As a user instead of going to one private, trusted and secure store I now have to visit dozens. All of which are going to be competing on price which means they will look to sell my user data to make money.
And what makes anyone think that the App Stores will simply not be dominated by Amazon, Epic, Valve etc like most gaming is today. In which case this is all about transferring money from one large corporation to another.
Didn’t even occur to me. It’s the obvious way app stores can earn money if there was some legislated effort to cut the commission fee and force multiple stores.
If I don't want to sell my product on the App Store, or if I have to make you pay more for it, I risk losing you as a customer. That's a trade-off every developer is aware of. Most apps that can publish on the App Store, will still publish on the App Store. On the PC, Epic sometimes has to shell out a lot of money to get an exclusive release, because a lot of people just use Steam.
However, a lot of apps can't publish on the App Store, because of the strict anti-competitive rules.
The repository model is basically the best of both worlds, from my perspective.