Everything apps are an affront to competition and the spirit of the free market

Kind of true, but also exactly what every big companies wants to have. Apple is doing the same thing in their ecosystem and so is Google in theirs, and Meta and Amazon have their on little versions of that too. That's really the biggest problem here, Apple and Google already own the smartphone. So it's difficult for a third party App to come in and do significant stuff, as Apple and Google can just reimplement their own version and have their App installed by default, while making life extra hard for third party Apps by breaking APIs or kicking them out of the store. See Apple and their stance on third party Web browser, they are simply not allowed in the store. Or see Meta's VR effort, which exist for no other reason than them not being able to make significant impact in the smartphone world, so they bet the farm on VR or AR being the next big thing after smartphones, that they still have a chance of owning.