> Lay off implications about bad faith
You're right, I crossed a line there.
From a market perspective, the problem is that in the short term it might be feasible to build a closed, tightly controlled market that rivals open alternatives, but in the long term general purpose computing acts as a safeguard against market capture and anti-consumer behavior -- and to a certain extent, consumers and markets in general are very bad at optimizing for long-term consequences.
The movement of both iOS and Android in this direction would not be as concerning if they didn't hold a duopoly over the entire smartphone market. Apple in particular has faced significant antitrust criticism in this area.
Open markets that empower consumers (and I mean that generally -- not just general computing but also home cooking, self-publishing, self-repair and hardware DIY) are the reason why closed-down markets don't degrade and become awful over time. Almost every capability on the modern locked-down iPhone started out as a 3rd-party proof of concept that Apple was later forced to offer in-house alternatives to in order to remain competitive.
It benefits even normal users who don't care about general-purpose computing that there be at least one mainstream option on the market where users can fix their own problems without asking a company for permission. And I don't think it's an accident that as Android and iOS have both moved away from that role, that we are now seeing increased calls for antitrust, increased criticisms from developers, and general outright rejection from these companies of new innovations like game streaming.
> Given the unparalleled success of iOS and Apple's locked down ecosystem, it's pretty clear that many find this level of security is very much worth using regardless of imperfect moderation
I do think it's slightly problematic to assume that users are conscious enough of security to make an educated decision to opt into a locked-down platform, but are not educated enough to avoid flipping a switch in the settings that turns that environment off and on. I don't think that users temporarily become security conscious only when they're in the act of purchasing a phone.
The more likely reality is that most users don't think about security or 'openness' at all beyond reputation/advertising, and the vast majority of iPhone users have probably never thought about the tradeoff between open access and security at any point during any of their purchase decisions for any computing device.