>A "monopoly" is not actually required for this. They can have their store and impose their restrictions even if there are competing stores. If users actually prefer those restrictions, they can still choose to buy apps only from that store, or only from stores that impose restrictions they like. That doesn't require the store to be tied to the hardware or to have a monopoly.

You're being highly disingenuous here. It doesn't mean you're wrong in what you want, but you're not honestly addressing the counterpoint and tradeoffs involved. What you should have noticed is that your logic works 100% equally in the other direction: "If developers actually prefer those freedoms, they can still choose to develop apps only for stores without them." There are full stack OSS phones in development, Android forks and alternate stores like Amazon did are possible, etc. Would you accept that as an argument in turn?

Obviously there are much more complicated dynamics here then your oversimplification. If a critical mass of key developers went to a forked store, users would face extreme pressure to follow regardless of whether it was horrible for privacy. Windows itself, brought up above, is the most direct example! It was totally open to any development, yet gained so many network effects that many users felt compelled to run it (if only in a VM) even if they hate it. This isn't some weird thing, in fact if anything it's Apple that's new for a general purpose platform. They've essentially been able to serve to some extent as a "union for certain consumers", in the sense of labor unions. Developers, platforms, and users all have a constantly shifting balance of power. By coordinating a lot of user power through a single point of leadership, Apple has shifted that. It is perfectly reasonable to purposefully "join the Apple Union" precisely because an individual wants more bargaining power vs Developers.

Just like management dislikes workers having more power, developers dislike users having far more bargaining power of them. And sometimes they're absolutely right! Users aren't always correct, and further just like union leadership can have its own goals, incentives, lockin/regulatory capture efforts, etc., that don't always align. Apple is using its position both in good and incredibly valuable ways for its customers (opposing not merely lazy/bad developers but certain kinds of government overreach as well), and for unnecessary, selfish and restrictive ends. Some of those are Apple's fault as a matter of choice, some are the inevitable result of a centralized point of failure/control (which still are Apple's fault, to the extent that the whole scenario is their choice).

I'm more then sympathetic to wanting to make tweaks and being really scared of a future where owners don't have any sort of choice for root on their own hardware. At the same time we should recognize that things got to here in large part because THE TECH INDUSTRY FUCKED UP. It was us, the tech experts and elites in particular. I remember damn well the jokes about PEBKAC and "lusers" and enjoying good reads of the BOFH etc. But Apple had the balls to actually confront a lot of our bullshit head on with a revolutionary message of "it's not your fault." We were telling users not to install random crap off the web, or install anything that looked interesting, or browse to shady sites, etc etc. "Users are so dumb argh!" Apple dared to ask

>"well, why shouldn't people just be able to browser literally anywhere, and look through a selection of software and install literally anything that catches their fancy at all, with as few as possible concerns that it'll hose their system or sneak them into some payments bullshit or even fuck with their privacy."

and rather then just dismissing it instead figuring out the stack necessary to try to achieve it however imperfectly. We, the collectively industry and HN-types for a decade before, could have done that but with a better balance of freedom. We could have had full crypto trust chains, but still the ability for experts to load their own root keys. Apple's idiotic decision to eliminate upgrade pricing has nothing at all to do with the goal there. Etc etc. Instead a void was left and Apple stepped into it, and it's been popular because it's providing a huge amount of genuine value to hundreds of millions of people.

So I'm suspicious about selfish calls by techies and competitors and devs to try to roll it all back without acknowledging the strengths, and particularly without respecting the people making a conscious choice to opt into it. It stinks of the same old smug thinking about "users are dumb, we know better for them." Why shouldn't their desires matter? I'd like to see much more fine-grained approaches tried FIRST before bringing out big anti-trust hammers. For example, the law could require a choice at order time (but unalterable after) to let people load root keys for hardware, software, both, or neither. Then consumers could still choose fully locked down devices when it made sense and different degrees of openness otherwise. Vastly improving warranty law would be another path to examine.