U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

- Music Apps (Spotify) that properly integrate with Siri, like on Amazon and Google devices.

I have ~200K photos in iCloud and do not have this problem of exporting, I “export” regularly onto new backup media.

However, I don't really export, I turn on iCloud Photos on Windows and set it to store on an external media with sufficient space (over 2TB now) and then tell it to locally store all media in full quality.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/108994

Once it's synced, I have a local folder with all the media. I have accomplished an export. Then I can turn it off, remove the media, and go back to a c:\ folder and not saving locally.

Now, you wanted without iCloud, so then, Windows 10 or newer? Microsoft has a phone companion that can pull things, or there's file explorer for just photos.

But absent iCloud, what I've done is run OneDrive on the iPhone, and let that mirror everything to OneDrive.

(An alternative used to be Amazon Photos, but I can't keep track of their business model, and Google Photos I can't keep track of what makes them decide to replace my originals with badly compressed alternatives.)

I sort of don't understand buying an iPhone, though, if you're not buying into the ecosystem.

The ecosystem is the point.

The ease of use of iCloud, the paired camera roll for your family (not same thing as shared albums), the family sharing of apps and subscriptions, the bring-your-own domain email with "hide my email" throwaway accounts to put into spammy sites, it's all there increasingly seamless, increasingly secure, and none of it is selling you out into third party ad-tech.

If you're not into that, there are other phone systems and operating systems and other hardware all grounded on different and separate principles. There's only one place for a cohesive coherent curated "don't make me think" peace of mind, and consumers should have a right to choose that since it stands alone in opposition to the DIY bricolage everyone else offers.

> meanwhile google takeout allows me to download all of my photos in my browser in a couple clicks.

Note that apparently Google Takeout doesn't give bit-identical files [1], which may be important for some (like me).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571747

The point of the quote was not that it's in their interest to differentiate. The point was that, according to the complaint and for reasons they lay out, their marketing is dishonest and they frequently put their users at increased risk when it's to their financial to do so.

In other words, they're saying Apple's privacy and security stance is a bit like the trope of politicians saying "think of the children!" whenever they are selling a law that restricts liberty.

Ok here's one big one:

Today the development process inside Apple treats the full software stack, from underlying OS to the homescreen UI (SpringBoard) to the user-facing apps (built-in or not), as a virtual monolithic system. All these gets built and integrated every day, leading up to each iOS (and MacOS) release. This allows new features to be released which are integrated together across many apps. This is what the people come to know as "The Apple Experience." When your phone does its big iOS update overnight, you get all the new features together.

Critically, these iOS updates can introduce any number of breaking changes to their internal APIs, databases, protocols, configuration files, etc. The daily integration and daily testing is responsible for making sure the final product still Just Works.

If the government gets its way here, Apple would be forced to develop all the built-in apps using public APIs, and would need to make sure those APIs don't ever break -- or else risk another "uncompetitive behavior" lawsuit.

Could that be made to work? Sure. But then the overall Apple Experience would very likely be worsened, as Apple would not be able to make certain breaking changes any more, and would overall move slower due to having to carry all the external apps along with any internal plans. The experience of Apple customers becomes worse because some people want it to mimic Android's model.