In fairness to Hey, they didn't plan to be in this situation. They thought they did everything apple wanted them to, and they spent years building this service, only to then find out apple won't allow it.

If you're going to exclude all potential products where you have to go through apple to be a major player (given the competition), you're excluding most of the software market. Maybe developers don't really have a choice?

And yeah, apple is not a monopoly, but apple/google for sure is a duopoly, and google is only incrementally better than apple.