I want Apple to make the best iPhone for how we live our lives today, which might involve relationships with one company’s virtual assistant, a different company’s smartwatch and yet a third company’s backup service. I can understand why Apple might want a piece of all those businesses, but it’s too many aspects of life for one tech company to control, or to always get 100 per cent right. Competition would make digital products and services better; and customers would choose the Apple ones when they’re truly superior.

Don’t just take my word about Apple’s mixed motives. Late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs held a 2010 planning meeting to talk about how to “tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem,” according to an internal Apple email. In another email that surfaced during the Fortnite trial, Apple senior vice president Craig Federighi laid bare why Apple wouldn’t make a version of iMessage that works on non-Apple devices: “I am concerned [that] iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.”

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Lately, Apple has allowed a monopolistic way of thinking to overrun even basic product functions. Ads for Apple services — Arcade, Fitness Plus, TV Plus, iCloud storage — have colonised once-simple menus, and the only way to remove some of them is to subscribe.

More proof that some of Apple’s restrictions are bad for consumers is that Apple actually reversed course on a few under the spotlight of government scrutiny. It loosened up iCloud Photos so we can move our pictures in bulk to Google’s more-functional Photos service (if you know where to click). And with iOS 14.5, we can force Siri to play music from streaming service Spotify by default instead of Apple Music (if we know how to train it).

Our digital lives are on a collision course with Apple’s monopoly mind-set. As iPhone owners, here’s what we should be able to:

Download apps and subscriptions from different stores

What Apple does: Only Apple’s App Store is allowed on iPhones, and we can’t easily download and install apps without the store. That means Apple alone gets to set its markup price, and alone gets to decide what app content is and isn’t allowed.

Apple says it reviews every app, and the control is critical to its ability to protect our privacy and security.

Why we should be independent: Apple’s control literally makes owning an iPhone more expensive. Apple taxes app developers up to 30 per cent, and they pass the cost along to us. Apple is also making unilateral decisions about what should be allowed in the App Store that not everyone agrees with, such as removing apps the Chinese government doesn’t approve of.

Android device owners have a choice of app stores including ones run by Google, Samsung and Amazon. With competition, customers could still choose Apple’s App Store if they prefer its values; but stores could also emerge focused on different values, such as apps vetted to not rot kids’ brains.

iMessage and FaceTime anyone (and anywhere) we want

What Apple does: The default iMessage chat app encrypts conversations and adds useful capabilities; but only works with people using Apple-made devices. Messages sent to and from people on Android phones come through as SMS text, which are less functional, less secure and can be flaky when people change phones.

In 2010, Jobs promised in a keynote presentation that Apple would make FaceTime video an open industry standard, but that has yet to materialise.

Why Apple should open up: Limiting iMessage and FaceTime makes the iPhone less useful. Many of Apple’s customers don’t live in a world where family, friends and work use all-Apple devices.

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Even iPhone owners can’t read their own message correspondence on a Windows PC.

Choose a voice assistant (or two)

What Apple does: The iPhone limits the use of a wake word and physical buttons to the Apple-made voice assistant Siri. We can deactivate Siri, but can’t just replace it with a competitor such as Google Assistant.

There is a workaround, but it shows just how much we have to contort around Apple’s control: We can create a Siri Shortcut to ask Siri to ask Google a question. (After setting up the hack, we literally have to say, “Hey Siri, Ok Google.“)

Why Apple should open up: Even though Siri has been improving, many of us have invested in a relationship with a different voice service to look up answers, go shopping or operate our smart homes.

Even better, let us have more than one assistant, like Samsung offers on its Galaxy phones with Google and its homemade Bixby. Maybe we’d choose to call out “Hey Siri” for certain queries, but “Ok Google” for others.

Clear away ads for Apple services

What Apple does: If you compared today’s iPhone software to how it looked even 5 years ago, you might be shocked by all the ads for Apple services. There are Settings ads for AppleCare Plus and iCloud storage, App Store ads for Arcade, TV app ads for Apple TV Plus, Fitness app ads for Fitness Plus, Apple News app ads to subscribe to Apple News Plus, Music app ads to subscribe to Apple Music and more.

Apple says its services are superior because they collect as little data about us as possible to protect privacy.

Why Apple should open up: Android critics call the preinstalled apps and ads on those phones “crapware.” But these Apple ads aren’t much better.

One reason people choose Apple products is because it has a tradition of keeping menus simple and clean. If Apple insists on pitching new customers on its paid services, we should at least be able to tap “stop asking” and make them go away permanently. If it can make the case that its services are superior, we’ll still choose them; and maybe the competition will spur other companies to compete on privacy, too.

Make our data truly portable

What Apple does: When we plug in our iPhones at night, Apple makes a backup of them to iCloud. The Photos app also offloads our pictures to iCloud. But after the free 5 gigabytes of iCloud storage fills up, Apple asks us to start paying for an iCloud subscription. And then it asks again. And again.

We can’t choose Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive for backups. Google’s Photos app can offload extra photos, but Google Drive isn’t a direct storage location in the native Photos app. And we can make a local backup copy of an iPhone on a Mac or Windows PC, but that requires plugging it in and waiting.

Why Apple should open up: It’s our data, and we should be able to take it wherever we want.

We might already have a subscription to a storage service such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive and don’t want to pay for another.

The Washington Post