These are Apple's devices

But that's the thing - they aren't. Not once they're bought. At that point, they're my device, or your device.

Surely you can see how having a single supplier can be a bad thing, right? That supplier has no incentive to deliver quality. Why would they?

If you want to start baking cookies and sell them, you need to beat several bakers in your town and several companies in the rest of the country if you ever want to be successful and profitable. This is because there are already several well-established suppliers who have proven they make great cookies - why would anyone buy from you?

On the other hand if you're the only one selling - you can reduce cocoa content in half to save costs, you can replace quality ingredients with cheaper versions for the same reason, you can increase prices as much as you want - the cookie-seeking customer will still buy, because there are no other options.

Sure, you can also be the best baker in the world. You can put love and care into every cookie that leaves your shop. You can care about customers and make sure they get the best stuff, because you have a monopoly and you can enforce that view.

But in reality, what actually happens is that those decisions don't belong to you. They belong to the soulless company that only has one purpose: maximize profits. And you can be the best person ever, but if you're working for a publicly traded company you're at the mercy of shareholders.

Why would you want this? Forget about apple, why would you want this in any field?

Bill Gates would love you. Microsoft used its position to kill of Netscape. Could you imagine how rich they would be if they could strong arm everyone into only using their products?

This logic makes literally zero sense

Because Apple and Android are a duopoly and virtually a global one. And you throw all the pro-consumer laws at monopolies and duopolies, to strip them of any leverage they might have over consumers

In this case, the government isn't forcing the customer to do anything at all. If you don't care about it, then absolutely nothing will change for you. The only thing it does is provide more options for people who want more options.

That would mean there's no malware on closed stores, which is simply not true. Besides, you can allow more than one store and still have high security. More to the point Apple doesn't care about protecting your rights, but their margins. More stores means lost profit and that's the only thing Apple cares about.

Also, assuming big companies are more capable of doing proper security is just flawed way of thinking. Just look at Sony whose hacking and leaking credit card numbers is approaching annual levels. If anything I'd say some security nut will do a significantly better job than Apple, because no company does something if they really don't have to, especially Apple who will opt to glue piece of shoe rubber to push on GPU chip instead of losing a penny on changing soldering paste. And it's not an isolated case either, on iPhone Max series they removed a single drop of adhesive which made sure chips were strengthened when phone bent slightly. They saved pennies there but that caused user's phones to lose touch on displays.

Just repeating their PR statement doesn't mean that's the correct way to go.

Having the option to install 3rd party is another attack surface, and gives a chance for the market - or authoritarian control - to to veer towards not being vetted by that walled garden.

Authoritarians are always going to be prefer authoritarian app stores where any app that threatens them can be swifty removed.

Authoritarians rule in part via suppression of information. All governments can mandate that specific things be or not be installed on devices, it's typically only authoritarians that are afraid of unknown things being installed on devices.

I wish I could simply tell you that you are ignorant and you would think for a moment and recognize it. It's not my crusade to educate you, and people don't like realizing they are wrong, but now it's out there for you to see, perhaps there is hope.

Android already has had this for many years and it is not an issue. We don't need to deal with hypotheticals here, Android has put these things into practice for a long time already, and it's a non issue.

Security is not there to safeguard you from stupidity.

Not really, it's not much of an issue on Android. iOS will probably do the same, but on Android if you sideload an app that could be malicious, the Play Store has play protect and scans malicious apks like an anti virus. But also phones are much better sandboxed and secured then desktop, so their security against malicious software is much stronger.

While not impossible, you have to try fairly hard to fuck up your phone like this. I'd be actively impressed if your story is true (particularly as you used the plural), and if so I'd like to know what they were specifically trying to install that fucked up their phones.

It's just statistically more likely they downloaded a malicious app from the Play Store than had any chaos side loading.