Well.. you could still limit certain APIs to official "app store" signatures, and in fact I guarantee that Apple will take this tactic and it will take further legal wrangling to deal with the overstepping they will no doubt do.

And on a more base level, Apple has overplayed their hand for far too long for me to be very sympathetic to their arguments. The app store is still loaded with scams, they still deny things for arbitrary and inconsistent reasons with little-to-no explanation, and they've had years to clean this up. It's not 2007 anymore.

Apple isn't acting in good faith. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Do you believe any large store front acts in good faith? You are inviting less privacy into the room at the expense of money for other people. It’s a bit crazy that we think Apple would somehow be able to limit cross app tracking after being forced to allow side loading and independent app stores. Hey let’s make this one bad actor allow in the rest! It’s not fair that they get to make the rules for the rest of us, we also want to act in bad faith!

What I am inviting into the room is the ability of people to run what they wish on hardware that belongs to them. This argument that general purpose devices used by an appreciable amount of the general public must be arbitrarily locked down and beholden entirely to the arbitrary, often greed-based whims of multinational, multi-billion-dollar tech corporations because tech-illiterate grown-ass adults might hurt themselves on sharp edges is both paternalistic and offensive, and I'm really quite over it.

Make the unlocking process something equivalent to rooting a modern android device (something that requires PC software, terminal commands, a number of steps on the phone, and a data wipe - i.e. something absolutely nobody will do accidentally and vanishingly few will do just because Facebook told them to) and both concerns are allayed.

This isn't some dichotomy, and treating it as such is playing right into the hands of the tech corps. This "for your own protection" thing is marketing. We already know that no principles are in play. Besides, mitigating forced obsolescence (and so, e-waste, carbon footprint, etc) is more important than Facebook getting another data point from a minority of users, and this can be addressed legislatively anyways.