F-Droid is orders of magnitude smaller, and its users are generally far more advanced, hence not worth trying to scam. The same applies to GNU/Linux too, though there's also other differences there too. Scale is really the issue, Android has 3 billion users, iOS probably has over a billion too.
Looking at the Android model, despite its greater openness than iOS, there is also only one dominant app market with a handful of third part competitors, from well-curated open source repos like F-Droid or XDA Labs to OEM third party ones that no one actually uses or wants to use like the Amazon Appstore or Samsung AppStack.
Really hard to say what would happen in a hypothetical situation where Apple allowed iOS alternative app stores. Maybe the overwhelming majority of users will continue to download only on the App Store, with a tiny minority of power users going to alternatives.
> Maybe the overwhelming majority of users will continue to download only on the App Store, with a tiny minority of power users going to alternatives.
That's absolutely what will happen, there's no evidence of otherwise.
But this is all beside the point. The argument is, if there existed a app store that was as large as Play Store / iOS store, it would have similar moderation issues. The old headline implies that these companies aren't trying to moderate, rather than realizing that moderating content at scale is a REALLY hard problem no one has solved.
No Google/Youtube, not Apple, not Amazon/Twitch, not Facebook, not Twitter, not Microsoft, no one.
True, fair enough. Makes me wonder if there's any corporate will towards tackling the moderation problem, either from these giants or from startups. It's a very difficult social problem.