In the marketplace consumer expectations can get higher, a sense of entitlement develops, and that entitlement can be the valid effect of genuine progress. Not because the providers
have to satisfy our sense of entitlement, but because they
do, because that's what it takes to compete until at some point that's what's expected just to play the game. Food providers at some point stopped competing on food safety because everyone demanded everything be safe. We started expecting cars to be very reliable, and if someone makes an unreliable car then fuck caveat emptor, it's not going to become a matter of whether some consumers are willing to make that compromise and some are not – instead your brand becomes shit and you have to beg people to come back, if you can at all. Right now we don't have that expectation about APIs; but some people want us to, we are moving that direction, and
maybe we will get there. Or maybe we'll get somewhere else; progress however ensures that we will get
somewhere, that consumers will find something new about which to feel entitled.
And yeah, these companies don't "owe" us anything, but consumers (even the subset of developer-consumers) can still get pissed off at them and say shit and that's the fucking market. And maybe it won't mean anything, maybe it'll all fade away... and maybe it won't. That's the risk those brands are taking. It's our market-based prerogative to bitch about whatever the hell we want to bitch about, using whatever hyperbole we want, with any sense of entitlement that we've acquired.
If someone starts sending mail bombs to these companies because they aren't tending their APIs as we'd like, then that's coercion. But there's no coercion here, this is just people offering their opinions. So quit yer whining about our whining, the internet has entitled us to whine as much as we fucking want to, and has offered market-based ways to lift or bury that whining.