It comes down to this: I support companies being free to sell the product they want and users being free to buy what they want. If Apple sells a phone that's locked down, a piece of junk, wonderful, or anything in between that's between them and their customers. It's not the government's role to step in and prevent those voluntary transactions IMO. I would allow exceptions for grievous bodily injury and so on in my outlook, but I don't think that applies here.
Third party app developers don't have a right to use Apple's app store in whatever way they want. They have a right to sell things to customers on whatever terms the customers agree to and with whatever agreements they are able to make with other businesses like Apple.
Of all the major and minor players in this space, Apple has by far taken the most user-centric, privacy-first, security-centric stance. And they have done so over and over and over again.
Have they been perfect? Of course not. But every instance where they've lapsed, they've made geniune efforts to improve the situation. Are there ways they can still improve? Of course. But the direction has been clear and unambiguous. And as a result, they've earned my trust. This, in an environment where quite literally everyone else has repeatedly proven themselves untrustworthy.
> It's not the government's role to step in and prevent those voluntary transactions IMO
I'm a EU citizen and I'm more than happy that they're taking on Apple for this. After all, they're doing business with EU citizens, why shouldn't the EU tell them to behave?
If they don't like it, they can just stop selling in the EU, no one's gonna stop them there, but seeing as it's a money hungry megacorp hellbent on hoovering up every single penny that exists on this planet, that obviously isn't gonna happen, so they'll have to play by the EU's rules in that case.
Third party app developers don't have a right to use Apple's app store in whatever way they want. They have a right to sell things to customers on whatever terms the customers agree to and with whatever agreements they are able to make with other businesses like Apple.