"A plane crashed? See! FAA regulations are useless and the agency needs to be disbanded."

The difference is nobody is saying that FAA regulations make plane crashes impossible.

Many people think what apple is doing makes malware impossible. That's not the case, the app store has plenty of malware and it's trivial to get malware on the app store.

The app store is trying to solve a subset of a subset of a subset of a subset of the problem, and then it doesn't even solve that. Yes, that means it sucks ass as a solution, unfortunately.

Or, to be more clear: the problem space is getting scammed. Apple is only even trying to solve an extraordinarily small subsection of that problem space.

You don't need an app to scam someone. And if you do have an app, it doesnt have to be outside the app store. And even if it's on the app store, it doesn't have to be malicious.

Even if apple did somehow, magically, eliminate malware there would still exist perfectly legitimate apps that can be used for scamming. And that would only address a tiny part of scamming anyway, because the vast majority of scams are not done using an app.