I'm not an Apple user but I'm sure you can at least do that in developer mode.
Here is my suggestion:
Create a customized version without the zaps feature and keep it on App store. People who want to evade censorship may still use it.
Publish the full version on damus homepage so that experienced bitcoin users can side-load it.
PGP encrypted E-mail works fine for private messaging.
Non of these alternatives do any better in terms of preserving privacy.
Yes everyone has his own view of the world but we all share this one world and that gives the greatest potential for each individual to find his community. If you agree with this, then a centralized network is more useful as it provides the highest discoverability.
I see there is a inherent bottleneck to federated networks, that data on server/relay nodes can not be searched efficiently because nodes do not share a world view so data cannot be indexed.
It is refreshing to see nostr to take an entirely different approach to not deal with inter-relay synchronizations at all.
