I disagree. I thought choice was always good, but in the case of apps for mobile phones it turns out I was wrong.

With my Windows Mobile phones I rarely installed anything new. That was because I had to:

- go and search out the apps to install
- work out whether it worked with my particular phone/os version
- work out which way to install the particular app
- go through the whole download/install process when there is a new version
- backup my data for the apps so that I could get it back after an os update
- reinstall it all after an os update
- work out how to uninstall all traces of apps I tried but didn't like (sometimes a very painful task)

etc etc

There is loads of stuff in the App store and the App developer have to play by Apple's rules, which makes all this headache go away. If developers had the choice not to use the App store then we would have a similar mess to the Windows Mobile approach.

The end result is that I have a couple of dozen apps on my iPhone, many that I use regularly and many that I paid cash for. In this case lack of choice has been a very good thing.