Yup. I was part of Verizon's app development program and it was a fucking joke. Even if the dev tools and build chain wasn't a complete mess, and even if the dev license wasn't expensive, and even if it wasn't almost impossible to even get test hardware... Even if you managed to build something more useful than snake, you'd still have to wait months and months and months for Verizon to sign your apps and then months more before they'd be available on any handset. I'm legitimately not sure it was even possible for a small dev to get anything approved.

Open app stores were and still are amazing. I get that people want even more freedom, but coming from the trauma of feature phone development, I find it hard to get upset about this, especially considering Android makes it dead simple to sideload.