To be fair, one of these vendors has also access to undocumented APIs that the others need to discover and reverse engineer to level the playing field:
Yes, thank you for this stunningly original comment. Nobody in the history of the App Store has ever dealt with this block, and this entire chain is definitely not about macOS specifically - which doesn't require using the app store.
It's undocumented, yes - but it's not like it wasn't there.