Sorry but that makes zero sense. Monopolies like these kill the free market, kill competition, kill innovation and by that they hurt the end-users and the whole economy. No one benefits from this current situation except Apple. That's why antitrust laws exist, to prevent exactly this type of behavior.

No you dont.

People with more users have more word of mouth network effects.

Thats not much of a choice.

Either participate, or be locked out and lag behind the competitors.

The problem here is that Apple is both the platform and the distribution network, when we know very well, computers work just fine with a distribution of power its pretty silly to argue anything counter to that.

Id love to see mac users round here survive on mac os with nothing but the app store.

Good luck without npm, homebrew, wget, or any other convenient way to install software.