Before they became strict, assuming that they are strict with their policies now, they opened their stores for developers to make submissions and get easy approvals. Many people were victims of fake applications because of bad managements from Google and Apple especially Google on their Play Store.

Apple do this better than Google in many years with more stricter regulation from governments on KYC, AML and costly fines on Binance, Kucoin recent months, these giant companies have reasons to feel fearful. What they do? Tighten their policies to meet latest changes on regulation but my doubt is they do this ultimately to protect users. It seems their ultimate goal is protect themselves first, users later because if users first, they would have managed like this years ago.