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You tell the user what entitlements or permissions are being requested at the point of the app trying to use them, stop treating the users like stupid children and let them make an educated decision about how to use the hardware that they own.

There are limits on Android anyway, what your side-loaded apps can do without you using a custom ROM or rooting the device is restricted somewhat.

Have you ever seen a random windows user? Do you think Grandma understands that?

I’m all for allowing power-users to side loads apps, but average user definitely needs to be thought as a child that will use 1234 as their password, and click ‘ok’ on every pop-up without even reading it.

Require the super scary "break app sandbox" entitlements to be activated behind an adb-command-mutated flag (or whatever the iOS equivalent of adb is) after jumping through the USB debugging hoops?

Android (Pixels specifically, so not a derivative of Android) does this and platform is just as secure

Which Android malware problem? Android has a permission system, every permission an app has needs to be approved by the user, and some permissions only system-apps can request.

There is no need for an app store review process to stop apps from requesting the "write to other application's data" entitlement; this can be enforced by the phone itself.

This is complete nonsense, the permissions are enforced by the OS, not by the store approval process, same for accessing the various parts of the file system.

To enforce permissions the OS needs to know what those permissions are.

That's what entitlements are, and the App Store review is what ensures you don't have bogus entitlements.

There are entitlements that, for example, control whether or not you can read the user's message database, the entitlement has to exist so that messages app and daemons can access that database. The App Store review process automatically rejects submissions with those, and other similar, entitlements. There are entitlements that allow reading and writing arbitrary data from arbitrary applications, because (for example) there are OS daemons and services that need to read/write all of that data (the settings app can report disk usage, there's the daemons that install and uninstall apps, etc), and again those entitlements are gated by store review.

The entire trust/security model for iOS starts at the store review disallowing system entitlements, and gating even allowed entitlements on appropriate notice in the app description.

You should really read the apple platform security documentation, but to give you an idea of what entitlements exist on the system I found this one for iOS 13: https://gist.github.com/jankais3r/1f839820f83be90d419140a6b8...

Hopefully you can look at that list and get an idea of how removing the gate on applications being able to specify whatever entitlement undermines a huge component of the platform security model.

On Android system apps have permissions that user applications cannot have, this is easy to enforce by the OS, same thing for iOS, if Apple does not allow user apps to have a certain permission it would be just disable from the sandbox environment, it's not the store approval process that disallow user apps to became system apps or that would be hilarious honestly, at that point why even jailbreak the device.

Also I don't know what you mean by bogus entitlements, if it's not meant to be used by user apps than it wouldn't be available to user apps, if the app needs to have access to a certain feature that required a permission, it would need to ask gently the OS and the OS would need to approve it (maybe even after asking the user), or the app would not simply to be able to access it, so it's in the app's interest to have the permissions laid out correctly so that the OS knows. From the previous message you seem to believe that the app could just simply bypass the dialog asking the user for permission.