What I'm not seeing is, does iOS have even enough market share dominance to require regulation? From what I remember they only have around 15% of the market.
Do Macs not "work"?
And if Apple's authentication servers are up.
Using them at work is a blessing and a curse.
Not even close to as well as iPhones do.
Speaking from personal experience I've had a few apps crash on my phone for sure, but overall it's the most "solid" computing experience I have ever had outside of Solaris.
MacOS on the other hand? Frequently gets itself into a state where "WindowServer" is consuming half my memory, or some network kerfuffle stops me being able to reach anything for a few minutes, or it kernel panics.
Not to mention the bloody updates which unlink GCC/CLANG but kinda keep it around which means I have to go clean my drive manually and crap. Ugh, exhausting.
Sometimes I consider going back to linux for work honestly.
While a phone is integral to daily life, that doesn’t make something “general purpose”, IMO. I can’t write code comfortably on it, for example. The iPad, OTOH, could be argued to be a general purpose computer. Heck, Apple even advertises it as a laptop replacement! But phones? I just don’t see it.
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That debate is the fundamental rub though: if you don’t see phones as “general purpose”, you’re more ok with locked down systems (consoles for example), but if you do see them as that, opening them up seems logical. The problem is that phones are in a gray area; they do many things computers do such as web browsing, email, etc., but they don’t function as them sometimes. Sure, we could put VS Code on Android, but I doubt anyone would ever use it.
So there’s not really a clear answer, and it isn’t helped by bad arguments from both sides: the “open” crowd claims nothing would change for those who don’t want it do (just keep using Apple’s App Store and ignore the others), but it would very easily cause a race to the bottom. And the “closed” crowd says to just choose Android, but Android is in many ways worse than iOS; worse privacy is a big thing.