[Silhouette]

Deliberately getting Fortnite kicked off is political.

Well, yes. I'm fairly sure they're trying to prompt that "major shift in the landscape" you mentioned. And I suspect that if a few of the other big players who have been unhappy with Apple's policies join them, they might even succeed, regardless of the outcome of the current legal action. Apple can almost certainly stand to lose one big name game from its ecosystem. But a "high end" phone that can't access the major streaming services or play several of the most popular games starts to look more like a phone that "just doesn't work", particularly with the sub-par web browser it also imposes.

One app doing it does not yet have me worried I won't still have an excellent selection of software, all with spying and other anti-user capabilities significantly dampened versus other platforms, in two years.

As I and others have pointed out many times, if you're relying on an app store for your platform's security and privacy restrictions, your model is already broken. The OS shouldn't be permitting inappropriate behaviour by apps, regardless of where they came from. Trying to thoroughly vet every new version of every app to ensure it will never do anything inappropriate that it otherwise could is a losing battle.

[spanhandler]

> The OS shouldn't be permitting inappropriate behaviour by apps, regardless of where they came from.

Sure, but they all do.

[Silhouette]

If the organisation you're trusting can't secure a single OS reliably, why on earth would you have confidence that it could vet every single app on its store and detect all possible abuses reliably? The latter is likely to be a much harder problem.