Let me ask a similar question: is preventing con artists from contacting the elderly with varying degrees of cognitive decline (i.e. people who would easily be tricked by them), totalitarianism? Maybe when it’s the government doing it, but how about when it’s a feature of some, but not all, phones?
Apple isn’t a monopoly†. You buy into their curated walled garden, by choice. Just like you see a movie by choice, or enter an art gallery by choice. At that point, you are intentionally handing control over your experience to the person or organization who curates the experience. But you can always revoke that control: just leave the ecosystem.
Analogy: City parks exist. National parks exist. National wildlife preserves exist. The former does not preclude the latter. If you visit the former and don’t like the curated nature of it, you can always leave, and go visit the latter, where things are less curated. But there is value and functionality in the curation of a city park. For one, you can take small children and pets to city parks and not have to watch them very hard.
(† If something is a monopoly, such that it’s hard to avoid using it, then this argument doesn’t apply. Facebook, for example.)
Case and point. I did not burst from the womb computer-savvy. I had to learn. Part of that was supported by the fact there were not highly technical barriers to entry in regards to expanding my computational toolset.
Getting something working on Android and iOS on the other hand, is over and again more complicated.
I can at least side-load to Android, but I must understand Sal and encryption enough to grok code-signing. That is not a trivial barrier to entry. For iOS, I essentially have to sign up as a member of a registry in order to even get something on the phone/tablet for development purposes.
My love of computing and figuring out how things work carried me to where I am today; but the high degree of friction that is increasingly implemented for no other reason than being good for business presents a form of computing that I'm still amazed anyone partake in as a pastime at all.
Hell, Android is specifically set up to prevent you as a User from doing anything you would conventionally do as a User of a computing system. It is very much a computing platform for the developer's and not the user's benefit.
It's a precarious balance to maintain admittedly, but what Apple has illustrated through their actions is that their Phones and AppStore are meant as an extension of themselves to do business first, and to be useful for what you deem fit second. Even if Hong Kongers ended up getting developer accounts to run the safety app, Beijing is well within their authority to use that list of "developers" as a basis for a crackdown by demanding Apple hand it over as a condition of doing business.
I can understand the luxury in just being able to get your Gram a mobile phone and not have to worry so much. I worry even more at the consequences in store a few generations down the line where the bunch of we Free Software nutters who remember what flying by the seat of our pants as root, damn the torpedoes, are not guaranteed to be around for to protest when increasingly large and entrenched models of proprietary software distribution networks and OS architectures lock users out of even being able to leverage honest-to-God General Purpose Computation.
The more decisions are left to the industry and supply chain, the more rights will be lost by the wayside in the name of doing business.