All the Bell Telephone company did was prevent other products/services from working with their system.
And access to those consumers is controlled by a non-government entity for everything they do? All commerce impacting their entire life up and down the stack?
Apple is the biggest monopoly since Ma Bell and Standard Oil.
They're owning people. Whole entities. You have to go through Apple to do business with them.
Without this, you’d have every single major company pishing their own installers with a ton of crapware on top of them. To give an example - Epic on Windows requires you to install their own store, with their own update system and notifications, plus ads showing each time you open up their game.
I don’t want this on my phone - battery aside, I want the device to be 100% secure, and such crapware has a poor track record of security.
I’m really for strong antitrust laws - Google and Facebook are monopolosts who abuse their position. But in case of the phones, both users and devs have a choice - they can use either Apple or Google. Unless both companies are guilty of the same thing (and in this case they are not), how this is an issue?
Furthermore there are plenty of monopolies in non tech industries that do the same things.