At some point it is. A smart phone is essentially a need today.

You're leaning many HN dwellers are communists

Communists as in collective ownership of the means of production or Communists as in some other non canonical definition?

Ah, yes, of course. Doing the slightest thing to reign in the worst abuses of trillion dollar companies is equivalent to completely abolishing private property. Thanks for the insight.

I literally cannot use public parking in my city without an app. A ton of services are requiring app based 2FA for their use. Anyone without a smartphone that uses either Android or iOS is literally being left out of a huge chunk of the modern world.

“Own this or you’ll be relegated to the fringes of society” very much sounds like coercion to me.

It’s electricity a product or a utility? What is a smartphone?

I’d argue that smartphones are rapidly approaching being utilities and search is way past that point.