To everybody in this thread saying, "Imma protect my iPhone because I spent $ARM on it," I'm going to retort with what happened two days ago.
I was getting out of my mom's truck, and my iPhone 15 Pro Max fell out of my pocket onto the street from a decent height. I don't have a case on it. There is very minor scratching on it. That's it.
This same fall would have utterly destroyed my iPhone X. But the 15 just took it like nothing happened.
I’m generally in favor of allowing sideloading. It shouldn’t be enabled out of the box, but it should be an option you can enable from somewhere buried in settings.
It wouldn’t create iPhone clones because sideloading doesn’t allow you to install iOS onto a non-Apple device. What’s more, sideloading is not the primary differentiator between iPhone and Android. iPhones still run circles around their Android counterparts in terms of performance, iOS still has a superior app ecosystem (fewer apps, sure, but there isn’t a sea of crapps), and it’s like Android devices seem to copy Apple’s style.
That wouldn’t be so bad.