> Imagine if Sony did this on Playstation. a) prohibiting the installation of non-PlayStation games and b) insisting that all purchases done via their store give them a 30% cut.
Many platforms are like this -- and many also have the majority marketshare. Is this a call to redefine what platforms can and cannot control?
I perceive capricious behaviour like this ad a threat to my liberty and well-being.
A separate concern is around anticompetitive behavior. There is no way to sideload an app, or even use a competing app store, and Apple is charging rent. This is pretty clearly anticompetitive behavior that harms consumers.
But iPads (though iOS was renamed/forked to iPadOS on those devices) are definitely marketed as general purpose computing devices. The headline on https://www.apple.com/ipad/ is "Your next computer is not a computer".
iPad/iPadOS have these same restrictions as iPhone/iOS.
All of this is still unknown outside of Apple. What is known so far seems to me like it's pointing in the direction of a pretty open macOS and a very much locked down iOS, to satisfy different needs. We'll know more by late fall, I guess.
I'm not arguing this is necessarily either wise or ethical of them, and there's a real sense in which this is orthogonal to the App Store's fee structure. But it seems to me that while Apple is going to face increasing pressure to change the way they run the App Store, the solution -- at least the solution Apple will offer -- very likely won't involve letting the iPad become a general purpose computer the way the Mac is.
Why do you think Microsoft bothered with WSL? We know that most Windows users won't do it. It was a developer-attracting move, meant to make it easier to build Windows client applications with Linux server components. Apple benefits from the same thing being offered natively. I can't see them abandoning it, even though it does create a tension between the Mac as a consumer product and the Mac as a developer's tool for iOS.