The fact that they so maliciously complied with the EU ruling on app stores just made the whole thing doomed from the start. As you mentioned, it’s not the app store that anyone really cares about, it’s the apps.

Apple making it equally ball-breaking to get an app blessed for install meant that there was no real increase in the number of FOSS apps available for the platform.

So it was all worth it, paying the fines, taking the hit of a few mean articles online. Now, apple gets to say that they told us so, and the monopoly lives on.

All while setting the precedent that google has now gone on to copy. Great!