That makes no sense when Google allows them on the Play Store no problem.
if people leave the iOS App Store when iOS eventually does open up, ask yourself: Was it really a service worth using if the majority abandons it? Competition is healthy and would push Apple to actually improve the App Store lest they be left behind by better options. Besides, the Google Play Store is doing fine despite having other options, so the iOS App Store will be fine too.
There’s no real evidence that that’s what would happen, though. iOS is not macOS, and macOS had a history of outside app sales before the Mac App Store. The sorts of people downloading and buying apps on macOS prior to the introduction of the Mac App Store had no real reason to go through the store. On iOS, the barrier to buying and downloading apps is a lot lower than it ever was on desktops, and so, people who’d never buy software online (at best, if they owned a computer, they probably bought software at big box retailers if they ever bought software) were now super comfortable with buying apps.
Besides, even on mobile platforms with multiple app stores, there seems to be a Pareto distribution/natural oligopoly. Any system that depends on mass scale is likely inevitably going to have an oligopoly of mainstream players with a long tail of niche players. Think how most countries have somewhere between two to five major cell phone networks, and then there might be a bunch of small regional cell phone carriers. App Stores likely exhibit the same characteristic. In order for the App Store not to be still a significant player in a post-side loading and alternate world, there would have to be a mass exodus of users and apps. Most users don’t appear to have any issue with the App Store, so it would have to be a mass exodus of apps. I’m not convinced most developers are upset enough with the App Store to trigger a mass exodus. (Besides, if you can be on multiple stores, it makes sense to be on the App Store because that’s where people are and where people will likely continue to be even if there’s App Store competition, down to user inertia, so no app exodus, so no user exodus.) In reality, the narrative in tech news (and lobbying efforts) seem to be getting set by some activist developers whose own ambitions clash with Apple’s (Epic* or Facebook**) or who are using the App Store as an excuse/explanation for mismanagement and money flow issues (Spotify)***. As evidence of my assertion, I present the dominant position of the Google Play Store on Android.
* Epic wants Epic Game Store to supplant Steam as the place to buy games and wants to be the dominant platform for it on mobile and desktop (probably console, too, if they can get away with it). Therefore, Apple’s App Store is directly at odds with their ambitions. Valve basically barely qualifies as a game developer anymore, they mostly maintain a few cash cow games and a game engine and sell everyone else’s games (even if they don’t use Valve’s engine), and Epic wants to be the new Valve.
** Apple’s privacy stance stands in sharp contrast to Facebook’s primary revenue source, so increased Apple emphasis on App Store privacy directly cuts into Facebook’s bottom line.
***IE, telling their investors “if we could have a subscription on the App Store without paying a fee to Apple, we’d be in much better fiscal shape”, while, in reality, bundles, developing world subsidies, and other management decisions that prioritized market share growth over profit are seriously eroding Spotify’s bottom line. This would have been an immanently foreseeable problem due to the fact that licensing fees for music grow the more users you have. The corporate strategy was to somehow use market share growth either to eventually drive profits or to make Spotify a sweeter acquisition target (I suspect it’s the latter).
