> they can buy any number of Android phones
I can imagine a world in which iPhone's and Android phones were drop in replacements for each other.
And I can imagine Apple selling many wonderful interoperable products into an open standards ecosystem, with a tiny fraction of its current market cap.
But we live in a world with a huge global corporation with a highly knit ecosystem, quietly investing billions of dollars retarding threatening innovation, continually raising switching costs, and the costs of interoperability with alternatives, growing a tax base of third party efforts having little to do with Apple's efforts (streaming media and games, third party stores, creator economy, ...), shifting inconveniences from users to third parties, etc.
There are worse forms of coercion, i.e. the systematic privacy violations and manipulative media of the surveillance economy (run in part by Google the major benefactor of Android, and which even Apple dips its toes into).
But the choice between iOS and Android ecosystems is anything but a simple easily informed choice, free of supplier leverage, conflicts of interest, with predictable long term implications in cost efficiency and future freedoms of choice for most users.
For the minority who do want this world, again, there is a laundry list of Android variants they can buy.
Coercion implies the threat of violence due to non-compliance. There is no coercion here. Apple, Google, etc aren't governments.
I think it's a little silly to argue that purchasing decisions for a device are an endorsement of every single aspect of that device. There are features that are desirable on iOS that would be enough to influence a consumer to buy an iOS device that have nothing to do with whether or not the device supports sideloading.
But if we are arguing that purchasing decisions are an endorsement of every corporate decision about a device, then it seems silly to argue that voting decisions are not a similar endorsement of government policy. And of course, Apple is not legally obligated to serve the EU, they're one of richest companies on the entire planet so if anyone is equipped to be choosy about the markets they support, it's Apple. However, Apple has freely chosen to do business in the EU, and EU residents have freely chosen to vote for politicians that have imposed regulations on Apple's presence in the market.
Of course I don't actually think it's that simple. But ignoring the lock-in present in government policy and market participation is no less silly than ignoring the lock-in on in a device where moving away from the ecosystem can cause your credit card to stop working. A more reasonable take is that consumers make purchasing decisions for complicated reasons, some of them having nothing to do with lock-in (if they are even aware of lock-in or security or user freedom debates to begin with, which is usually not the case), and their preferences about these systems can change wildly depending on the circumstances and affordances and research that they do.
As an example, Facebook argued that users were clearly opting in to tracking on iOS by choosing to use the Facebook service instead of the many other available social networks they could sign up for. Thankfully, Apple didn't agree, and when users were offered a more clear choice about whether to share advertising IDs with Facebook, many of them said no. If we took a view that participation in an ecosystem was endorsement of the entire ecosystem, we'd be arguing that Apple adding privacy controls in front of Facebook was somehow circumventing the social-media market. But as it turns out many users did want privacy controls in front of Facebook, just not so much that they were willing to avoid Facebook entirely. When offered the best of both worlds, they were happy to use Facebook while sharing less information with the service.
More generally, I don’t believe I nor anyone else should mandate anything about a private software company’s product roadmap (least of all spiteful bureaucrats obsessed with targeting American technology companies).
The precedent this sets is absurd. The market already provides a solution outside of arbitrary coercion: we all have the freedom to purchase other products.
