On Android, it's still much easier to install apps from outside Google's app store (just change the "install unknown apps" setting, download the .apk file, and open it) than it is on iOS.
As a practical matter, though, only a very small number of people will ever do that. Being kicked out of the play store is almost always going to be a death sentence for the app.
Apple has earned plenty of criticism themselves, but I do appreciate that they curate the app store with humans.
But if both Apple and Google remove your app from their stores, at least Android has a fairly straightforward method for your users to install it straight from your website.
For iOS your users will have to sign it themselves (but still via Apple, who could block that too) with their own developer account, just to get a time-limited install. Or, even worse, use a jailbroken device to work around all this.
They should kick Facebook out of the play store. See what happens. Facebook can then pivot to paying OEMs even bigger sums of money to bundle it with their devices.
It's trivial to sideload apps on most Android devices. You can't sideload on iOS unless you jailbreak or spend some time and money on a developer account, and even then you're rather limited on what you can do.
If Android were really as free and open as everyone says it is, then there would be a method built into the os to download and install apps directly through the web browser, without hunting through settings and enabling it.
As it is, this is barely better than iOS, and I’m kind of disgusted that everyone thinks it’s fine and normal as a solution.
It's not thaaat clunky. With my phone I click the download link, it downloads the apk, asks me if I want to allow to installing apps from the browser and then asks me to install the app. Installing a program in Windows is more complicated 95% of the time.
On top of that, if you have a rooted phone, you can use F-Droid to automatically install updates. For me updating apps from F-Droid is actually more convenient than updating apps from the play store, which I have to manually install.
There absolutely could be phone vendors selling LineageOS phones with F-Droid as the default app store. The only really important thing that would be missing for a lot of people would be WhatsApp.
If you think this isn't coming to iOS next you've got another thing coming.
If you actually do care about privacy and free speech and aren't using an iPhone because they're fashionable in your country then you should check out purism and pine64. They're the only phones I know of that are designed not to run "mobile OSes".
It’s not that iOS is safe from this, it’s that in all practicality, Google is not really that different as what my friends popularly suggest. Android is not a free, open OS. Well, it is to a point, but realistically that point is not much further than ios for most users.
As for an alternative mobile OS, I would love to get my hands on Sailfish, but it’s not available for the US.
