No, we shouldn't have had an alternative app store on iphones. Apple doesn't have a monopoly. Nobody is forcing anybody to buy an iphone to get online and make calls.
If you start a company, and you have 50% market share [1], do you want to be treated like a monopoly?
In a free market, Apple should be allowed to operate however they see fit, as long as they don't have a monopoly. Of course it is annoying that they can demand that much, but that's how open markets work.
All those developers who want better conditions on an app store, nobody is preventing them from joining their forces and creating a better operating system that promotes their own store with more favourable conditions.
Android is a sitting duck. Take objective c, the bsd kernel and the openstep libraries and link them up to your own mobile operating system. As long as Oracle doesn't win against Google, it can even have the same api as ios and thus all the existing apps from the apple app store. At first, offer it as a ROM for android devices, then start making your own. Apple's devices are expensive. Customers will love to buy cheaper alternatives.
Judging by the upvotes of this story alone, there should be 1000 developers wanting to have their own app store. If half of them invest some time of their life to create a new objective c operating system, they should have something operational in a year or two. Most likely much faster than the legal proceedings that could create a second app store on ios, with the nice benefit of being in control of the process.
[1] Research into Android vs iOS market share in the US shows that the market leader remains Google Android, with a 51.1% market share in June 2019. https://leftronic.com/android-vs-ios-market-share/