If Apple will allow third-party app stores or direct installation of applications on devices, dictatorships will lose this capability to harm Apple's customers.
But of course we all know that this policy was never intended to protect users, it was to protect Apple and their appstore monopoly, which also allows Apple to extort developers of 30% of all of their revenues by forcing them into Apple's payment services. Finally, the world has had enough of this and starts to fight back against it.
As someone who switched from the Samsung note line to iPhone, the only freedom I felt from the ability to install other apps was the freedom to deal with all the unrecoverable crap ware.
There’s other phones out there with greater freedom than the iPhone, people are aware of them, and are still choosing the iPhone.
The curation is a benefit in that I have a corporation with thousands of employees working to prevent the other corporations from making my user experience worse. If the curation goes away I’d probably switch to a cheaper phone next upgrade and I’m sure apples aware of that
Oh, and of course you won't be able to use push notifications, because Apple.
edit: the apps expire after 1 week and need to be constantly reinstalled. This is abusing an exploit in apple's walled garden that will surely be "fixed".
The fact is that you are allowed to sign apps with a free dev account, the cert will just expire after a week.
AltStore’s been around since 2019, so they’ve had ample time to “fix” it.
Edit: they do not need to be reinstalled. With AltStore the cert update is automatic and wireless (your computer handles it and sends the updated cert to your phone). You will never notice their expiration, and never need to reinstall, unless you’re away from your computer for more than a week.
The point is as the device owner you have the ability to run code on your own device outside App Store without paying Apple. To be able to effectively distribute such code to the average iOS user who may not understand how to deploy unsigned app and the potential implications of it is a different story and one that you could argue is designed to protect the layperson against themselves (contrast this with users running random .exe from emails on Windows).