It's about 10 years late, but whatever, better now than never.
I wonder if this decision is informed by the likelihood of legal action taken against them. Microsoft lost the largest anti-trust suit in tech history for a far less innocuous practice ~10 years ago. I've never really understood how Apple has skirted by with this. I think part of it is because the price tag of their products has contributed to a much more balanced market share, where Microsoft aggressively priced PCs to capture market share against competitors, so they had a greater legal liability for unethical or anti-competitive business practices. There is a curious affect of this, though, that the only time you see ardent Apple boosters or Apple themselves talk about Apple's negative market share is when they're defending the company against anti-trust allegations. Like, you'll never see an Apple fanboy or Apple themselves brag about Apple's lackluster global or regional marketshare ...... unless they're being criticized for anti-competitive behavior, and then it's like "Ohhh! No! Anti-trust doesn't apply to Apple because, don't you know, Android dominates Apple in market share?"
On top of the app lockdown on iOS, Apple has not invested in their core apps. Safari, in particular, has no development effort keeping it up to date with web standards, security essentials, or anything that anybody should expect from a modern browser. FireFox, Chrome, and the half dozen small or niche browsers, get hundreds of updates a year, all the time, effortlessly in the background, keeping them up to date with new web technology and secure against exploits. Safari gets almost no updates, has fallen woefully behind contemporary web standards and support, and essential updates are often packaged along with major Operating system updates, which are invasive, disruptive, and often avoided for days, weeks, or months at a time. People rightfully criticize Android fragmentation for the core operating system, where 3rd party modifications to Android from Samsung or others mean that updates often take months or years to roll out to all users... It's an annoying problem with Android, but it's less invasive because applications like Chrome can update on their own and have used this model ... for ever. Apple has recently allowed core applications to update on their own independent of the OS, but it still hasn't been widely used as it takes a long time to change a decade+ worth of development tradition (if you've ever worked at a software company that went from monolithic yearly releases to weekly or daily releases, you know how long this takes... Years, sometimes decades, and some groups will still always lag behind).
There's a saying in the web development community that "Safari is the New Internet Explorer" (and please don't @ me with that bogus fucking Verge article from a year ago saying Chrome is the new IE6, it was a nonsense piece that contradicted itself. I demolished that article in another thread about Chrome and will do it again but don't want to have to). If you're a developer developing applications in a compliant, standards-based way, you're guaranteed to get the most headaches from Safari, which is a continually finding itself a generation behind other competing browsers in support and implementation of basic web technology... And like IE, because it's the default, pre-installed browser on hundreds of millions of devices, you have to support it. It costs money, takes effort, reinforces bad development habits, and forces you to do the same shit you've been doing for a decade+ with Internet Explorer.... coming up with hacks and work-arounds that make your applications less secure, more brittle, and hurt future proofing.