Having a choice is better than not having one, all around.
You can argue the changing employers is hard. I can also argue that 50% of my customers use iPhones and so I have to use one and know how they work. I literally cannot have an app business without dealing with Apple. That’s why this is an anti-trust situation.
Having choice about some things is better than not having one, all around. But some people choose (!) to delegate their choosing to others in certain fields. For example, the choice of whether to purchase safe meat or unsafe meat is a bad choice to have. It's doubly bad if you aren't skilled at determining the safety quality of meat. That's a choice I'm happy to outsource to a third party. Similarly, I'm happy to outsource a variety of choices about app terms of use to Apple.
Did you miss the part where I said that 50% of my customers use an iPhone? To be clear: 50% of the general population in the United States uses an iPhone. 90% of the youth market uses an iPhone. That doesn't leave much of a choice for developers at all.
You simply cannot have a successful app business in the US without being on Apple's app store.
Meanwhile, there are millions of potential employers in the United States.
And no harm would come to consumers by giving them that choice.
With a law that requires Apple to open their platform to allow actually usable sideloading and/or competing app stores, we'd have removed more harm than we've added.
[0] Me, for example since I can't even comfortably put a program, that I wrote, onto my own device without paying Apple $100 a year.
[1] Every one of my business customers who wants a native app for their customers who they already had a relationship with before Apple came along and stuck their nose in to say what we could and could not do with our customers customers devices.
There's a spectrum of what you're allowed to do software-wise with various computing devices you purchase.
One the one extreme, you have something like a washing machine. It's a computing device running a particular suite of software that is essentially impossible for the end user to modify or replace. Many (most?) embedded systems are like this.
On the other extreme, you've got open hardware platforms like the Arduino where you can do whatever you want with the software for a very large value of "whatever you want".
The Raspberry Pi is in the middle, but very close to the Arduino. A Nintendo is somewhere in the middle but close do the dishwasher. Android devices are somewhere in the middle, but closer to the Arduino than the dishwasher (though this varies between devices and manufacturers). iOS devices are, again, somewhere in the middle. Much is allowed. Some things are not. OS X devices are closer to the Arduino than iOS devices are. That's also an intentional choice by Apple.
The placement of iOS along that spectrum is an intentional choice by Apple that customers have proven to support by buying iOS devices in prodigious quantity.
It's not obvious to me that taking a market leading choice in that spectrum and removing it produces less harm in the balance. It might, but it also might not. I'd be inclined to let people vote with their wallet as long as viable alternatives abound, which they do.
Not really, because there is no balance. Way more harm is done in the name of protecting people than is done by allowing freedoms.
The rest of your argument is predicated upon there being some kind of balance. There isn't one.
You don't need to look any further than The War on Drugs to see this. It's already been scientifically proven that letting people do what they want is far better for society. The only people who work to keep drugs illegal are those who benefit from them being illegal. Same thing here.
There's not much more to say about this. You're never going to convince me that removing freedom is better for society when people will always have the choice to remove it for themselves by making the right choices about who to associate with or who to do business with.
They're free to try. There's more of us than them though and we're also free to continue enforcing our existing anti-trust laws and make new ones for important digital platforms.
I advocate for freedom for the common man. What are you doing here?
And the "more of us than them" suggests that rather than any principled approach, you advocate something like the mob rule that the Athenians described to the Melians: the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. Fair enough. That position has been common enough throughout history. Right now lots of people appear to like the way Apple is running their company. Does that make it right? You seem to think no, but are articulating reasons why you should think yes. That's perplexing to me.
I'm trying to make sense of what I think about the disagreement between Apple and Epic. I'm not sure. The arguments people are making against Apple so far seem unsuccessful and problematic to me. I think the collective bargaining argument I've cautiously advanced might make some sense.
If you couldn’t tell that I completely disagree with your backwards notion of what’s right and good by now and that nothing you’ll say will convince me that less freedom for common folks is somehow better...even after I’ve told you this directly...yet you keep responding to me, I guess you just need to have the last word?
Have at it!
Well, in that case, if employers force you to install something then just tell them give you a work phone. Or talk to them, you are adults.
And if that doesn't work, well, tough luck. This sounds like trying to solve a malfunctioning workplace problem by making everyone else suffer - it isn't my or Apple's or anyone else's problem that your boss forces you to install shady apps.
And besides, what different organizations exploring what different tradeoffs? Right now the only practical options are Apple and Android, there aren't really that many options as to have a healthy environment and Google isn't immune to making decisions that can have an overall negative impact to the control that people have over the stuff they buy (see their Stadia console as an example and how it completely and absolutely removes any notion of control from people buying games - not even consoles, let alone PCs, feature such loss of control).
I know people who break from what you call the practical options in both directions -- some who reject smartphones altogether and live their lives without them, doing all their digital work on computers that they have full control over -- and some who use only the stock apps on their phone and wish that app stores were not a thing. They want an entirely managed experience.
Neal Stephenson's essay In the Beginning was the Command Line gets at some of this nicely. Some people are, as he says, Eloi and some Morlocks. That's OK.
Off topic rant: I was going to get her Dell. I had forgotten how bad the consumer Dells were. By the time you get a decent one, you might as well get a MacBook Air.
Many employers do that very thing. How many people have been compelled by employment circumstances to install Zoom despite its dubious pedigree? What happens when a corporate timecard app exists only in a 3rd party app store?