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!
It’s not all good intentions of course, this would also make it easier to ‘work around’ all that annoying end to end encryption so they can snoop on the terrorists, the pedophiles, the communists or whatever todays excuse.
The other issue is that Apple locks features and doesn't allow others to use. NFC is locked to Apple Pay, browsers are all Safari Webkit, ultra wideband can only use the Find My network.
Also arbitrarily blocking of (competitor) apps like disallowing Xbox Game Streaming.
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.