> What laws are you referring to other than Terms of Service which are entirely artificial constructs whisked into existence by service/platform providers? Which will, admittedly, be as draconian and onesided as the courts will allow.

There are two main ones.

The first is the CFAA, which by its terms would turn those ToS violations into a serious felony, if violations of the ToS means your access is "unauthorized". Courts have been variously skeptical of that interpretation because of its obvious absurdity, but when it's megacorp vs. small business or open source project, you're often not even getting into court because the party trying to interoperate immediately folds. Especially when the penalties are that scary. It's also a worthless piece of legislation because the actual bad things people do after actual unauthorized access are all separately illegal, so the penalty for unauthorized access by itself should be no more than a minor misdemeanor, and then it makes no sense as a federal law because that sort of thing isn't worth a federal prosecutor's time. Which implies we should just get rid of it.

The other one, and this one gets you twice, is DMCA 1201. It's nominally about circumventing DRM but its actual purpose is that Hollywood wants to monopolize the playback devices, which is exactly the thing we're talking about. Someone wants to make an app where you can watch videos on any streaming service you subscribe to and make recommendations (but the recommendations might be to content on YouTube or another non-Hollywood service), or block ads etc. The content providers use the law to prevent this by sticking some DRM on the stream to make it illegal for a third party app to decrypt it. Facebook can do the same thing by claiming that other users' posts are "copyrighted works".

And then the same law is used by the phone platforms to lock users out of competing platforms and app stores. You want to make your competing phone platform and have it run existing Android apps, or use microG instead of Google Play, but now Netflix is broken and so is your bank app so normal people won't put up with that and the competition is thwarted. Then Facebook goes to the now-monopoly Google Play Store and has "unauthorized" third party Facebook readers removed.

These things should be illegal the other way around. Adversarial interoperability should be a right and thwarting it should be a crime, i.e. an antitrust violation.

> The problem is that FAANG have turned the concept of general computing on it's head by making every bloody handset a playground for the programmer with no easily grokkable interface to the user to curtail the worst behavior of technically savvy bad actors.

But how do you suppose that happened? Why isn't there a popular Android fork which runs all the same apps but provides a better permissions model or greater visibility into what apps are doing?