Ultimately I think the only person this benefits is Tim Sweeney, as he gets the Epic store on iOS/Android/Playstation/Xbox.
Realistically this just drives people into a different walled garden. One that is device-vendor agnostic, but a walled garden nonetheless - in that your purchases are tied to Epic. This law could have been so much better, but now it just trades one problem for a bunch of new ones (some even worse than what it's trying to solve).
One thing that might have been nice - making allowances in the law for centralised certification authorities with fixed tariffs, so that Apple still checks the builds as it does now for the App Store, but then the builds can be released elsewhere (as the signatures will match). For this they could charge a fee, which could be capped in the law at a percentage of the sale price (and obviously much lower than 30%). This way iOS/Android could still have guaranteed protection, for which Apple/Google's costs are covered, but the user would have freedom to get their software from wherever.
The problem is that hardline free software advocates would still complain about this, insisting that the certification authority be scrapped. iOS and Android are now Windows, and it's going to be a mess.
You underestimate the blessing that is an app store that's free of bullshit policies restricting what you can and cannot publish. With F-Droid on Android, I used to have access to apps like NewPipe that Google would never even consider carrying on their app store, but - because I had a third party store, that wasn't a problem.
Now that I have an iPhone, I miss NewPipe greatly. But with this law, I might be able to get something like it in a few months without jailbreaking.
Not underestimating it at all, it has value. Unfortunately it undermines so much of the security model in other areas that both platforms will rapidly become malware swamps.
Realistically this just drives people into a different walled garden. One that is device-vendor agnostic, but a walled garden nonetheless - in that your purchases are tied to Epic. This law could have been so much better, but now it just trades one problem for a bunch of new ones (some even worse than what it's trying to solve).
One thing that might have been nice - making allowances in the law for centralised certification authorities with fixed tariffs, so that Apple still checks the builds as it does now for the App Store, but then the builds can be released elsewhere (as the signatures will match). For this they could charge a fee, which could be capped in the law at a percentage of the sale price (and obviously much lower than 30%). This way iOS/Android could still have guaranteed protection, for which Apple/Google's costs are covered, but the user would have freedom to get their software from wherever.
The problem is that hardline free software advocates would still complain about this, insisting that the certification authority be scrapped. iOS and Android are now Windows, and it's going to be a mess.