The public dismissal of the evidence these researchers presented in the last few weeks was surprising. It isn't truly important whether the App Store is an integral component of iOS, which it practically is until Apple becomes compliant with the provisions of the Digital Markets Act, it merely compounds their legal issues due to ignoring user intent when iOS analytics are disabled.

The main issue here is that Apple has been collecting personal data for years through its own apps without informed consent, which is in breach of GDPR. You need to ask for express consent to collect personal data in the form of non-essential user analytics, having a privacy policy and a toggle in settings to opt out of data collection is not enough, and it does not matter if the data collection is done by a website, app or an operating system.

It was particularly frustrating to see people argue that it's just an older version of iOS, when the reality is that one needs to hack an iPhone to see how this data is being syphoned off, and that jailbreaks for new iOS versions can be prohibitively expensive to achieve. Despite that, researchers pointed out that they see similar encrypted packets being sent with a recent iOS version.

I think it's worrying that consumers can't inspect the traffic of a device they own, and this is also an area that should be regulated so that our rights are respected.