That only affects the developer, not the consumer. What does the consumer care about who gets paid the fees.

I keep seeing the App Store framed as a consumer issue rather than a developer one when it's not. The App Store is no question pro-consumer especially when you consider the fact that the "open" web has essentially devolved into using every available toolkit to track users across the web.

I'm not at all interested in giving Facebook yet another platform where they can run amok with native hardware. I'm not interested in cleaning off Bonzai Buddy off my parents and friends phones.

I care if it means the applications are ~40% more expensive than need be.

Instead Apple had implemented the most stringent, pro-privacy features and polices on any platform bar none.

So if I were you I would not use any app or search engine. Just to be on the safe side.

What I actually do is: minimise the number of apps installed, run a pihole to misroute unwanted traffic, run a VPN tunnel between home and a VPS that I manage myself for location masking and additional egress filtering, install a nonmonetized content blocker for which the source code is available (and run in advanced mode, with assets manually unblocked only by need), and use DuckDuckGo as my search engine.

Neither MixPanel nor GA are in my good books, and if a website requires such spyware to load before it functions, I abandon it.

What's more, I don't allow anything of the sort to be installed on my own services. The only third-party assets permitted are the card-capture fields from our payment gateway.

Tiktok grabs your IMEI number, amongst numerous other things and sends them back to the mother ship.

Not saying that other platforms don't collect data, but Tiktok is known for being a whole other level spyware. If Apple was truly trying to protect consumers, there's no way it would allow it.

Maybe I misunderstand you but the quick search[0] I did on Google says Apple iOS API doesn't allow programmer to fetch IMEI number. Did TikTok find a way to circumvent this and get the IMEI?

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41278494/how-to-get-imei...

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19927160/finding-imei-nu...

[2] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/31122

There is no ability to get the IMEI on iOS.

Somehow grabbing your IMEI is "whole other level of spyware" than Facebook, who had an app that was analyzing all the traffic sent through your phone.