It's not much of a choice - and yes - Android exists, but in a duopoly of 2 shitty choices, Android is arguably the shittier one. Yes, you can install arbitrary apps there, but then you lose much more of your privacy, security, and long term support.

Voting with your feet doesn't work when every company in the segment is equally bad or very likely to become equally bad in short order.

Bad marriage? Find another partner. Bad employer? Find a different job. Crappy friends? Ditch em and try another.

Of course that's an option that should always be on the table. But I hope you agree the first approach is to try to fix things, to try to start a dialogue, to raise awareness and come up with solutions. It adds little to the conversation to just say: 'why don't you just ditch it altogether?' It's lazy and in fact it's often bad advise to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Apple provides tremendous value to its customer base (hence the trillion dollar market value, that isn't just from consumer charity or corporate monopoly, but mostly from real value) and having to pay $8 a month for the 0.1% of Apple users who build Apps but don't distribute and cannot be bothered to renew a weekly certificate, is generally not a good enough reason to exclude yourself from using one of the world's most mainstream personal computing & communications platforms.

Sunk cost mentality. They have invested time and resources into learning a whole platform, only to find that it is not suitable for use, and they have to start all over again somewhere else.

You can be critical of Apple's App Store policies and still want to take advantage of the unique features of the platform.