How do you "pressure the walled garden"? The walled garden only works when it has coercive power over others. If it was easy to opt out of it then most people would. When it isn't easy to opt out of it, you have no leverage against it.

Emailing the c suite seemed effective in this case.

That's not pressure. It was entirely within their power to not respond, and then what?

Walled gardens are not the baby, in that metaphor. The so called benefits are rentseeking arrangements, exploiting and imposing ignorance on consumers. The costs to society outweigh any advantages by many orders of magnitude.

Consumers actively choose walled gardens over free alternatives. In fact, consumers are willing to pay premium AND put up with all the rent-seeking precisely because the free alternatives are trash in terms of UX/UI, which at the end of the day is more or less the only thing that matters to consumers. I do think that through (primarily government regulation) we as a society should try to lessen the rent-seeking and inscrutability.

> Consumers actively choose walled gardens over free alternatives.

This is the specific thing that customers are prevented from doing. If you want Apple's hardware, whose processors are faster than Qualcomm's, you get Apple's App Store. If you want iOS instead of Android, you get Apple's App Store. If you need iMessage, you get Apple's App Store. And no other.

It's not a separate choice. If it was, what it would look like is multiple app stores on iOS, and the choice would be whether to use any other than Apple's. And then tons of people would use the other stores, especially if Apple continued to reject apps people want.

If you don't want green bubbles, you have to choose walled garden.

And it's not like Android is so much better.

Do you want the one with the wall, or the one with the barbed wire fence with a tunnel under it?

What if I just want to come and go as I please without crawling through the mud?

Exactly, the android ecosystem is only better in that the code is more open and the hardware manufacture more diverse. You still run into the competition being brutally squashed. Computers and devices should be completely open and accessible to their owners. If someone wants to run Tizen or windows or ios on a phone, or should be entirely up to them. Instead, the world has basically 2 choices, with a vanishingly small minority of users able and willing to try things like pinephone hardware or Linux on personal devices.

Consumers are given a false dichotomy - they have as much choice and agency as a child being asked "do you want a 7:45 or 8:00 bedtime? Mommy and daddy will let you pick!"

It's awfully hard to apply pressure when Apple refuses to admit wrongdoing. Their corporate ethos is too opaque to allow for any real change at this level, the only time they go about making change is when there's significant legal pressure directed towards them.

It gets even harder since Apple refuses to admit why their ban triggered in the first place. If we knew how they work we could fight it, but as is this is just a black box to outsiders, you can't fight that. I assume that is why they don't tell, if they don't tell then you can't do anything to fight it.