It’s a clever-evil (clevil?) gambit, right? Become the largest corporation on the planet, but somehow skirt being a monopoly technically. If Apple’s iPhone hardware team colludes with Apple’s App Store team, it’s just collaboration. If they did so with a third party, it’d be collusion.

Meanwhile:

• Third party Bluetooth hardware (like smartwatches) has to use an inferior API than Apple’s private one for their Bluetooth accessories
• Third party browsers have to use Apple’s rendering engine in degraded performance to Safari and can’t use their own
• Third party apps are forced to follow Apple’s power policy (ex: background apps can’t run over 10 minutes) while Apple’s apps can do what they want.
• Apple can circumvent third party VPNs to always allow their traffic to 17.0.0.0, so there is basically no way to block an Apple device from talking to Apple HQ except for taking it offline.

On Android you can take an OEM device and change most aspects of it to suit your needs. On iOS, nope. Sad thing is though, Google seems to be slowly closed-sourcing Android to be like a broken version of Apple.

In the end, we all lose.

The laws need updating, also the people in governance need updating so they can comprehend these things.

Edit: Formatting

I must be seriously misunderstanding the US legal system. OEMs can ship whatever store they want next to Play Store. I have a Samsung phone in my hand with Galaxy Store coming out of the box proving that point.