I’ll chime in as one of them (and in every thread about this many more people do as well) - it’s one of the many things I like about an iPhone, the tighter control and gate keeping Apple does on the App Store. I like not having to worry so much on the App Store or wade through scams etc (I know there’s not none but seems less and it’s easy to find the apps I want) and for my parents and less tech savvy friends it’s great
But personally it comes down to it’s a phone not a computer to me and I don’t want to or care if I can run “anything” on it.
I love the tight control Apple keeps on the app store, just last week it forced an app update on me that deleted all my OTP keys, because the OTP app was bought by some malware vendor and I didn't get prompted that this prior personal project was now controlled by a literal scam artist company prior to them pushing an update. Their commitment to safety goes so far I can neither inspect the data saved by the app nor look at the app binary itself, can you help me understand how that makes the iPhone app store secure?
The lack of scam apps and crappy clones is the only real advantage that appeals to me. On the Play store you can type in the exact name of an app that someone has told you and it'll show you a whole page of fake and copycat apps.
Look up any popular game, although a lot of the bigger ones are good about reporting their clones and getting them removed. An immediate example I can think of is 2048, the original by Gabriele Cirulli, is published by Solebon LLC on the Play store, when you look for 2048 using the search, it's not even the first result that comes up. Although to be fair to them, it's not the first that comes up on the apple store either.
Do you think 4096 is different from 2048? It is not developer friendly if they stop something similar publishing. And it already leck of creative, like just only can use gpt4o on iPhone.
But personally it comes down to it’s a phone not a computer to me and I don’t want to or care if I can run “anything” on it.