People say Apple care about the user, but they don't, they care only insofar as ensuring lock in. They don't care if you hate Apple, just so long as you keep giving them your money. As long as you don't hate them enough to leave, they've done enough.

The only way to fix it is if enough companies make their user experience so much better on Android that having an Android device is a more attractive offering than an Apple one and enough users flee Apple for alternatives... but companies don't give a shit if you want Android or Apple, what they care about is how much they have to pay developers to win your money and your eyeballs on their products.

I've worked on a number of high value development teams for these types of apps across mobile platforms and this attitude has been common across all of them: If they can still win your money through a crippled user experience that it costs them a minimal amount to maintain across both platforms, that's what they do. They want Apple's market. They want Android's market. They don't want to maintain two applications and two development teams because that increases costs and they want similar user experiences on each device because brand fragmentation hurts their image. So in this sense Apple is also hurting Android and it's evidence they don't really give much of a fuck about the user as long as they're getting your money.

I say this as someone who has experience on the inside of development teams that provide the apps you love on the devices you love, and I say this as someone who loves my Apple devices but am by no means an iFanboy.

* purchasing a physical item * purchasing an electronic item accessible outside of the app * subscribing to a service accessible outside of the app * purchasing things through the app owner's own payment gateway

And then expand from there as necessary. Probably the restrictions would need to be tighter than that, but something along those lines.