Fun to imagine such a dystopic setup but entirely unrelated and not even close to equivalent.
Food producers and sellers need to meet certain standards to sell their food. We take these standards for granted but they aren’t without cost. We like the standards because it means that we can generally trust the safety of the food we buy without needing to know much about it.
This is the point Apple sells on. Users are able to download apps and configure their phones without _any_ concerns of compromising their device.
Not everyone wants these guidelines and protections but for a large number of people they are worth a premium.
Imagine if every time you installed software on your Mac, they charged a $0.50 fee to the software maker. Even for a shell script.
How is that ANY different?
They're only doing this with iPhone/iPad because they can, because by the time they realized it could be a profitable business for Mac the expectations with their customers had already been established, and they had too much competition.
As soon as they had a competitive edge with iPhone, they resorted to rent seeking.
> They're only doing this with iPhone/iPad because they can, because by the time they realized it could be a profitable business for Mac the expectations with their customers had already been established, and they had too much competition.
That's not historically accurate, and I worked in a core engineering group at Apple. An early concern on battery-dependent devices was that the software running on them would not deplete battery wastefully, and the famous/infamous offender giving rise to what you (understandably) question was the Flash runtime. The upshot of poorly written software (which gave rise to attempts to test and charge for access, which you dislike) was customers in a competitive landscape (Symbian and Android) thinking Apple hardware sucked, while that was not the hardware reality.
So, I get your perspective but it's overlooking the early and very real problems which caused this gateway/gauntlet to attempt improving user experience as a higher priority over developer inconvenience.
Food producers and sellers need to meet certain standards to sell their food. We take these standards for granted but they aren’t without cost. We like the standards because it means that we can generally trust the safety of the food we buy without needing to know much about it.
This is the point Apple sells on. Users are able to download apps and configure their phones without _any_ concerns of compromising their device.
Not everyone wants these guidelines and protections but for a large number of people they are worth a premium.