If users didn’t want these things, users wouldn’t buy them.
For the vast majority of people, and iPhone is way, way better than a computer that can run any app, precisely because it can’t run any app they click on.
I’m a hacker, so I would love to be able to install any software I want on my iPhone, and introspect it in other ways.
Most users, however, would have a way worse experience using their phone if they were given this option, because a non-trivial percentage of them would follow the tutorials online provided to them by malware authors to install their malware.
This is precisely what happened to desktop computers. Has everyone forgotten about Bonsai Buddy?
People who want a general purpose, configurable device that can run any code they want on it have options. They’re big, clunky, out of date phones.
Apple is being punished for their success here. They happen to make the best phone hardware at the moment, and they bundle the best phone hardware with cryptographically-enforced editorial decisions about the best software that runs on it.
I think the real danger here is that of censorship: if the state commands Apple to delete (or actively remote-disable) certain apps, a huge problem exists. Today it’s WeChat or TikTok. What if tomorrow it’s Signal? iMessage’s encryption has already been backdoored for the feds in the default configuration via iCloud Backup (which is not end to end encrypted and backs up the entirety of chat history from the device to Apple each night). The state could literally command Apple to prohibit any type of secure communication from the device via this method and they’d have to comply, and iPhone-owners would have no recourse due to the DRM. That’s the real danger.
There’s a real argument to not allowing Apple to do this, but I don’t think “consumer choice” is it. Consumer choice chose the walled garden over the anarchy of Desktop Computer Malware.