Apple's trendy, status-seeking customers may own the hardware, but they AFAIK only license the OS software. Otherwise Apple could charge them for updates and eschew responsibility for shipping bug patches to the as is/caveat emptor product.
Legality aside, I have no issue with the ethics of those who preserve their freedom to tinker by ignoring Apple's arguably abusive TOS. If you want to make a compatible "
clean room" FOSS replacement for iOS equivalent to Android's Cyanogen project, I might even donate XMR in support of the effort.
I understood that Cyanogen has abided up to a certain point to Google's requirements, for them to be able to legally access the Google Play Store. They got a cease-and-desist letter from Google that if they wanted to write tools that accessed Google's stuff, they had to comply to certain requirements by Google. I don't know exactly which ones, but that sounds somewhat like if Linux/GNU wanted to continue to distribute WINE, they should agree to certain kernel requirements by Microsoft.
So Cyanogen is not so FOSS as you may think (this also comes about because the Cyanogen main dev now has his own business, selling Cyanogen).
I don't know the terms they accepted. If this is security-related (if Google wants to have its hands on certain privacy related aspects), then this would seriously annoy me. If it are just some technicalities not to screw up Google's store, then I can understand.
In any case, DRM and freedom are not compatible. Intellectual property and freedom are not even compatible.
Notice the free market is already punishing Apple's approach by taking away swaths of their market share and giving it to competitors.
I think that a weak point in all this FOSS/liberty thing is the propriety hardware. In the end, the code can be free, but you're linked to propriety hardware of which part of its functioning is unclear. And in as much as a small set of people around the world can develop software, it is quite difficult to do the same with hardware, where you need big, and centralized, investment (not just time and competence, but real material stuff: a factory). Maybe FPGA are an answer, but this is slow hardware.
None of this navel-gazing about whether or not the AppStore should disappear in a puff of logic and justice has one iota of relevance to Dash Masternodes failing the Howey test, and thus creating a situation where Apple could be sued by the SEC (for obvious reasons) and their own investors (for incompetence or malpractice or whatever you call it when executives ignore their lawyers and thus destroy value).
I'm still not sure whether THIS is the reason (the real reason, not necessarily the announced reason). It might just be a matter of image and "we're a law abiding company that stays away from dark net stuff". The real test would be whether Apple accepts monero to be taken up, or zcash. Then this would be cleared out. If monero is refused also, it is because Apple doesn't want to be associated with the "dark net anonymity" image. If monero is accepted, your explanation might very well be true. But I suspect that Apple is rather "corporate", and wants to give a public impression of law abiding.
It depends on what the majority of their customers think. As any company should care about.