Point of clarity, the devices we are discussing are neither telephones, nor are they general purpose.
They are smartphones, a sort of miniature computer with a bunch of general-purpose sensors, and actuators viz. a screen and a speaker and some haptic feedback. They don't really do much computing per se; we outsourced most of that to The Cloud some 15-odd years ago. These things are just highly capable I/O devices, or clever terminals if you prefer.
And while Android has the PlayStore or whatever they call it this week, one can usually choose to load rogue APKs and one can usually succeed; and things like the Pinephone or Fairphone have been attempted that leave more power (and responsibility) in the hands of the user, but in practice it seems that they simply don't _work_ that well.
I agree with you wholeheartedly; I just think the "if" part is a bit out of sync with reality.
If they think some third party feature should be part of the core experience, they're going to incorporate it. This is true when building on anyone's platform (e.g., Microsoft, Facebook). Non-core experiences, like domain specific software, are less likely to suffer this fate. It's similar to when MS decided to ship a browser. God help you when the platform you're on decides they want to subsume your features.
As sheer hardware revenue growth slowed, they moved their focus to services [0]. That’s also what we’re seeing on their push into more ads for instance, and this new feature goes the same direction: to benefit these encrypted backups you’ll need to sign up for storage. For most people wanting to cover more than one device, they’ll probably end up with the 2Tb plan which is at 10 bucks a month, the bare minimum 50GB being at 1$ a month.
[0] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/how-services-bec...
This is veritably false, they made $80 billion selling software this year. You might not see the App Store as software revenue, but Apple certainly does.
Amazon seems to be doing well despite Apple Books.
"If you buy a phone or general purpose computing device, you have the legal right to choose your app store and applications installed on it seperate from manufacture demands".
The particular problem with Apple is not only duplicate your app, they can underprice it by 30% because they don't self pay their own store tax, and they can kick you out of the only app store for whatever reason they choose to make up that day.