alt Hacker NewsI don’t mind Apple’s walled garden in the abstract, but the fact is they’ve been a terrible steward of their App Store. If you search for an app to do something small but useful, instead you’re presented with an ocean of identical apps that all have $10 a week subscription fees. The golden age of “hey I’ll just go on the App Store and buy something handy for $3” has long past, and a lot of those few-dollar apps have switched to a subscription plan anyway, meaning the money you spent was thrown away.
I have an Android phone, and almost everything I use on it is installed through F-Droid or directly from the author's Git repository. Every time I do something useful on my phone, and iPhone users ask how to do it, there's nothing equivalent available for a their phone.
The worst part is the maintenance required just to keep the same unchanged software available to new phones. You have to pay annually to keep your account open, and regularly recompile the application for new OS versions, even when the OS is backward compatible. This not only means someone's open-source weekend project isn't going to be worth publishing for free, but it won't even be worth publishing for a one-time charge. For the simplest utilities, everything is shifting to recurring charges. Often that entails someone else compiling an open-source application to iOS, filling the market with sketchy unofficial releases, with predatory billing schemes and unexpected add-ons.
Sometimes Apple straight-up prohibits useful utilities. One of the most useful things a phone can do is act as a portable Wi-Fi signal analyzer, logging signal strength and signal to noise ratios from various locations. That's not even allowed by Apple.