Finally. Apple can keep their Walled Garden all they want, but preventing other people from running arbitrary software on their own hardware is the sort of thing we would have called "unthinkable" in the late 90s. Hopefully this sets a precedent for more open hardware and more competitive software. It's always baffling to look at the responses to this, with people hating on the EU for making these decisions. Don't agree with it? Keep using iOS then. Nobody is forcing you to change your device. If this really is a useless feature, then it won't matter in the end. Net win!

what a complete cluster...

People with good intentions, who also don't know how things work want to force interoperability of messaging apps. What could possibly go wrong.

Would be better to just mandate a maximum % commission chargeable on the platform. 10% seems reasonable.

I'd take a walled garden over a superfund site.

We don't have to guess how this ends, FB and Google have already shown us with their VPN-scandals. These alternative app stores will lure people to them by keeping apps/features gated in their stores or they will do what FB/Google did and just pay people.

There are a lot of things that are behind permissions but with no oversight can be exploited. The "sandbox" cannot protect from reporting on everything the user does, snooping on the network (BT or Wifi), or any number of other creepy things. That's why there are some capabilities Apple doesn't give out to anyone or they require extra review. If that gets taken out of their hands then I worry what some alt-app-store apps will ask for/demand in order to use their app. Sure, the user has to accept it but without the App Store guidelines apps could require them to accept a bunch of permissions before they can use the app.