If you don't want to buy into a walled garden, you have the choice not to do so.

The problem here is that the people who announced the "open" platform option were lying to everyone in order to gain market share.

> If you don't want to buy into a walled garden, you have the choice not to do so.

You can still lament the wider societal scale impacts of increasing controls. If both Google and Apple become walled gardens, then what exactly is left? And people need smartphones to get through daily life, interact with banks and government offices.

And I bet Windows is going to head down the same path. ID-verified-by-default, only government and corporate-approved apps installable, AI surveillance running in the background analyzing your every click (for your safety) etc. You see, we need that to catch the bad guys.

You can certainly lament anything you like and refuse to buy into walled gardens, but it's not Apple's fault that Google lied to you about their platform being "open".

You can't really if there's only two viable vendors and they're both walled

The problem here is that Google lied about Android being open.

The solution is to force Google to keep the promise that they made to consumers, which is the job of the courts.

I would expect them to lose yet another antitrust case over this if they don't back down.

Does Google want to have Android and Chrome stripped from their control?

> Does Google want to have Android and Chrome stripped from their control?

That would be amazing but it's not going to happen.

And the EU will back their sideloading validation because they want to spy on all of us anyway. This will be done with a backdoor in each chat app, meaning they want to be able to block unsanctioned apps.

Stripping Chrome from Google's control is already one of the suggested remedies in one of the antitrust cases Google has recently lost in the US.