Apple is a monopoly on the market of Apple apps. You can’t just hand-wave away self-created platforms, and given how absolutely important and essential mobile phones are, it’s only fair that the government gets a say there.
This but also because of the size of Apple's market. If they sold 1000 phones per year nobody would give a f... about their commercial practices. In the USA apparently Apple is bigger than Android, so about phones Apple is a larger monopolist than Google. In the EU, not as much but still a relevant one.
Android has a 66% market share in the EU, and ~55% in the US - which it gained only recently (~2021/22). Otherwise Android has had the largest share globally.
By definition, A monopoly force does not have a 33% or 50% market share. It has full control.
If you want, you can switch. If you want, you can use products that are NOT locked to a vendor. You have Dropbox, you have obsidian, email - any number of tools that are not vendor locked.
If you want a phone, you can take many of the comparable or superior phones in the Android ecosystem.
This is being phrased as a goal for "User Freedom". If a user wants the freedom to have a locked ecosystem, where they are the actual paying customer, so what?
Any absolutist user freedom argument has to also deal with users who dont want that freedom.
If this is about meaningful freedoms, then the threat is revenue models. There is no reason the Apple ecosystem should outperform Android - yet it does.
