I switched to iPhone after they added the tracker blocking to the OS.

Everything is a tradeoff.

I’d love to live in the F droid alt tech land, but everything really comes down to utility. Messaging my friends is more important than using the right IM protocol.

Much as I wish I could convince everyone I know and have yet to meet to message me on Signal or whatever, that simply isn’t possible. Try explaining that I am not on Whatsapp or insta to a girl I’ve just met…

Also it is nice to spend basically no time maintaining the device, and have everything work together coherently. Time is ever more valuable past a certain point.

But why do we have to choose between convenient and open? Why are these companies allowed to continue having these protected "gardens"? I don't believe a free and truly open ecosystem for mobile devices would actually be less convenient than iOS or Android. If anything it would be vastly better.

Has it occurred to you that the stronger control of the ecosystem is a feature that supports the convenience and integration that's possible?

This is just the "Why not Linux desktop" argument from the past two decades. Sure, in theory it can be configured to do a lot of different things. But you're probably gonna have to work out the details yourself because the downside of theoretically supporting everything is that it's impossible to just have it work out of the box with every single scenario.

They have big numbers. Big numbers tell that 95% of people would need to be in closed protected gardens rather than getting slaughtered by open source wolves.

That's a low bar for girls IMO (not being able to grasp that someone might not want to use Whatsapp or Instagram).