To ensure that developers continue to develop for their platforms and users continue to turn to their platforms for implicit advice about apps, the same reason they do most things in their stores.
Apps with large install bases are implicitly valuable to the platform as they are popular with phone-buying customers. It's not in the platform's interest to alienate the developers of such apps as those apps, together, cause people to buy that platform's devices to run them. The incentives are aligned.
If I distributed VPN malware via enterprise certs, I would lose my developer account. When Facebook does it, they lose the enterprise cert.
If the secret goal here is to make sure that lucrative developers all get warm reviews, why don't all lucrative developers get warm reviews? Apple makes in fact not all that much money in the scheme of things, even in the just-the-app-store scheme of things, from Robinhood.
Go look at the review scores of all of the top apps in the app store. None are below 4 stars, unless they are apps for services where users don't have much of a choice in apps, such as crap companion apps for hardware or national services that people are forced to use.
So the fact this looks as one would expect without nefarious manipulation is proof of nefarious manipulation? Your argument is still a little difficult to follow.
