The vast majority of Android users use the Play Store (or the Amazon thing) exclusively. So Android is not different than iOS in this regard.
The vanishingly few remaining users use F-Droid (sometimes exclusively), which is probably the safest app store on Earth, with GNU/Linux and *BSD distros' base repositories. Open source only, reproducible builds with public recipes written independently, trackers removed (because they usually rely on non-free libs).
I honestly don't see how having only one store makes an OS safer. That store could be an unchecked mess.
We could talk about policies around app inclusion and permission management though.
If the argument is "the number of stores is not a useful metric", I agree.
If the argument is "Apple in particular has a huge vested interest in making sure that their first party App Store doesn't distribute malware", that's somewhat stronger.
I don't know which argument nektro was trying to make, I could read it either way.
Personally, I lean towards the point about vested interests, although it is only "lean towards" not "fully embrace": what they care about isn't strictly security, but their bottom line, and being a US company with US moral norms and US payment providers, this can also be observed in the form of their content rules — they seem to treat sex as a much more important thing to hide than violence[0]. This does not sit well with people like me who think violence is bad and sex is good.
[0] A bit over a decade ago, the app submission process flagged the word "knopf" in German translations, telling me it was a rude word and I might get in trouble if I was using inappropriate language. It's the German word for button… or knob (but in the sense of button, it's never a dick), and so I can only assume someone got a naughty words list in English and translated it literally rather than asking for a local list of naughty words.
> The vast majority of Android users use the Play Store (or the Amazon thing) exclusively
Are you sure? Android phones are pretty big in China, which is by far the world's largest smartphone market, and I guess Play Store & "the Amazon thing" (I don't remember the name either) adoption there is close to 0%. Anecdotally I have noticed a lot of people using phone vendor app stores in India (the second largest market, though half the number of devices as China) and Indonesia (another huge market). Taken together I'm very skeptical that Play Store + Amazon have a majority of Android users.
Google and its services are mostly blocked in China, so using the Play Store would require the use of a VPN or a foreign SIM card. There are a variety of local app stores. I've found that people often just use whatever came on their phone (which is often the phone manufacturer's own app store).
The vanishingly few remaining users use F-Droid (sometimes exclusively), which is probably the safest app store on Earth, with GNU/Linux and *BSD distros' base repositories. Open source only, reproducible builds with public recipes written independently, trackers removed (because they usually rely on non-free libs).
I honestly don't see how having only one store makes an OS safer. That store could be an unchecked mess.
We could talk about policies around app inclusion and permission management though.