Apple has always banned you from sideloading anything on an iPhone and now Google is following suit. Soon Google will make sidelong a giant pain in the ass and only available to "developers" with the reason being to scare normal people into thinking doing things how they are done now is "too dangerous" and that they need to nanny us and not give us full control of our devices.

Microsoft is still desperately trying to shove everyone onto their Microsoft store and their "universal" appx bullshit or whatever. Once enough people have been switched over, its game over for traditional executables.

For context the Microsoft Store came out in 2012 and was a big reason why Valve went all-in on Linux because they could see what Microsoft's long term goal was here from a mile away.

It's been 13 years of slow build up to this.

You are the frog in the slowly boiling pot.

No, these are things tested on gaming and phones. If it works and there isn't much resistance it'll come to regular computers too. First you had Steam for games, then came the iphone with an app store and then it became a thing in general computing. That's how things go.