Same thing that happens whenever interested parties gain control of your stuff, they use it to benefit themselves at your expense. Watching the digital age transition from such potential for freedom and personal empowerment to walled gardens, access restrictions and consolidated control has been a tragedy to experience.

One thing that the article misses is that there sre different types of users.

There are plenty of users who are basically computer illiterate and only care that things “just work”. Those users happily cede control to the OS because they dont know how to manage it themselves, don’t want to learn and don’t want to be taken advantage of by malware. That is perfectly legitimate and is probably the majority of end users.

Then you have the tech savvy users who want to push their devices to do more, whether it is taking full advantage of their hardware or optising their system or trying out different software. Those users want and need access to their hardware. They’re a minority but still a large and substantial group in a global scale and always will be.

As the article says, the problem is that the tech companies are using protecting and serving the first group as an opportunity to take control and lock all users out of their own hardware. It comes down to bad regulation by govwrnments, which is also driven by extreme ignorance by politicians and the legal system.

Apple is nothing short of an abusive monopoly in its own market. It sells it as a strength but the EU at least has made some moves to break their monopoly. Apple keeps playing the security card while in reality it’s about protecting the golden goose - 30% cut of everything the user does with their device is insane.

Google dreams of being the same; every step in this direction will be sold as being in the interests of security but in reality it’s with an eye on the control and money Apple derives from iOS without having to lift a finger.

I’d never buy an apple device due to the apple tax. The apple tax affects all consumers though as companies price a service on apple to pay their 30%, then often price the same on Android and take the profit. We’re all being screwed by these digital monopolies.

In some ways I hope Google does lock down Android, as this will increase the user base of more tech savy people who would then actively support a 3rd OS like an android fork or a pure Linux phone. I’m personally very interested in a Linux phone now for example. Perviously it was a curio I wanted to try, now thanks to google’s actions it’s feeling like some thing essential that I need to jump to as soon as it’s feasible.

My worry is that for many people banking and payments apps are essential and may prevent them switching as they’re currently very locked in to IOS or Android ecosystems. I might have 2 devices though, 1 liberated device as a daily driver plus back to using my physical cards and a 2nd android device to access banking apps (something I already really do from home anyway so don’t need on the go; it’ll ironically probably be more secure that way!).