If that comes to pass, there will be no highly-guarded, highly-moderated mobile OS to choose from.
But we're not talking about changing the operating system, are we? We're talking about opening up the marketplace.
If you're relying on perfect/near-perfect moderation of every application in your marketplace to protect your users from abuse by developers, that already seems like asking the impossible.
The operating system should have a robust security and privacy model that protects users, regardless of what software they run on it. But if you have that, the source of the software matters a lot less, and any argument based on restricting distribution to authorised channels will be weakened.
Conflating these two fundamentally different issues might be convenient for Apple's PR or legal departments, but it's still obscuring how a customer's device is being restricted in ways not necessarily in that customer's favour.
But we're not talking about changing the operating system, are we? We're talking about opening up the marketplace.
If you're relying on perfect/near-perfect moderation of every application in your marketplace to protect your users from abuse by developers, that already seems like asking the impossible.
The operating system should have a robust security and privacy model that protects users, regardless of what software they run on it. But if you have that, the source of the software matters a lot less, and any argument based on restricting distribution to authorised channels will be weakened.
Conflating these two fundamentally different issues might be convenient for Apple's PR or legal departments, but it's still obscuring how a customer's device is being restricted in ways not necessarily in that customer's favour.