The issue in question is: should a company that provides a product, one whose value proposition is focused on a cohesive ecosystem and experience, be forced to break down their walled garden to let people create a new app store or install apps in a way that’s outside that companies vision for their own product.

Yes. Because it’s too big and too popular to be making niche arguments like this. Its customer base is vast and diverse, nearly as diverse as the population of the planet. It’s absurd to suggest that every single one of those customers, or even 80% of them expect everything they do on the device to be taxed by Apple. It’s their device, not Apple’s.

The reason they should be forced to do this is that no one will force users to use this option. They can make it slightly out of way, just like how Android makes you explicitly allow installing apps from anywhere but the Play Store if you want to do that. And just like on Android, most users won’t touch that option. Those that want it would. Just like any other general computing device on the planet.

Apple is openly acting like a government and claims it has the rights to tax anything that goes on in its realm. But it sure as fuck isn’t a democratic government. About fucking time an actual government took it down a peg. Or a hundred.

Edit: FWIW, I’m definitely not singling out Apple here. All big tech companies are acting like governments and they all need to be punished for it. Or they should become actual democracies. That would be nice.

(I don’t think that could ever work, not in my lifetime at least)