No problem 😊 thanks for taking the time to read.

I’d agree with some form of regulation and would love to see it done on many things, but it’s very hard to do with regards to pricing services (value is subjective to most people) and with most major businesses it’s all about maximising profits so they’d look for loopholes or simply increase the price of everything so their profits remains the same and/or increase.

Sadly though Apple in particular has veered far from what most would like to see. A whole “right to repair” movement essentially sparked thanks to apples anti-consumer practices where they essentially forced customers to get repairs done in their own stores, preventing customers from finding cheaper repair alternatives. In the US they also had government help in preventing alternative/independent repair shops from using refurbished/repaired parts (these were authentic MacBook and phone parts that were fixed but blocked from delivery).

I’d have to give it to Apple that it does test the majority of software for malware but they still miss some too and there’s lots of games that would be considered malware in my opinion (damages phones or collects data across multiple apps/spyware), they only have guarantees against ‘known’ malware, so anything new that’s purpose built can bypass their detection. But generally speaking App stores on either platform don’t intentionally push malware onto consumers and do similar testing to search for known malware, it’s just easier to bypass and do on android since it’s a lot more open.

I may sound like I’m shitting on Apple but iPhones, iPads and MacBooks are good quality products albeit overpriced they tend to work great imo and everything within the Apple brand does work very well together, usually an instant plug and play.

This is a gross simplification but here goes nothing;

Let’s say Pepsi buys every shop in your local area and now they’re all Pepsi stores, by your logic it’s fine if they only sell their own product, so then you’ve only Pepsi available, but in turn they also increase their prices to maximise profits after achieving this monopoly and claim to be consumer friendly while stripping consumers of choice. Apple follows a similar model but they keep a can or two of Coca Cola “on display” priced well over their own and hidden in the store behind crates of Pepsi so they can claim they’re consumer friendly.

By keeping such tight control over their App Store and not allowing consumers to use the products they’ve paid for as they please (by allowing them to modify or use whatever they’d like on it), they’re effectively “buying up all the stores” while also taking larger cuts than any other App Store on phones.

It’s not so much forcing a Walmart to allow a mini-target, it’s more-so Walmart buying everything then leaving you with no choice as there are no competitors anymore since they effectively removed them by leaving consumers with no choice but their own “store”. It’s also unfair on the developers of the apps who will usually sell their product for the same price on either store while their profits are less on iPhones for the same product thanks to apples tight control.

In my opinion, it really is just about choice, would you rather more choice/options and the ability to do what you want with the products you pay for or would you prefer a company limiting your choices for the purpose of maximising their profits.

Anyways hope ya get my point stranger, all the best!