Meh. The real “cult” is how all of Apple’s products work so well together. It’s well designed and thought out and makes it hard to start over in another ecosystem that pretty much has all the same “faults” as Apple’s but it’s not as popular to hate on them. Apple and Google are definitely gouging when they take 30% of app sales. Thanks to the EU we should be able to sideload apps on iOS in a year but I don’t expect that to take off for quite a while cuz how many people know what “sideload” means in either ecosystem?

And as much as we’d like to see iMessage play more nicely with default Android messaging apps, the whole conflict is overblown. You make it sound like it’s sooooo hard to install Signal or WhatsApp like the majority of the smartphone using world has done for the past decade. We’ve been cross-platform chatting with friends and family with no issues forever. But I do miss the stickers.