Funny enough, apples behavior was enabled by microsoft setting really shitty precedents in the 90s. oh whoops!

Seriously though microsoft was a force in the 90s and early 2000s. If you weren’t around for it you simply don’t realize how insane it was for something like computing to have come around and quickly take over the world with microsoft being the thing. you only had a pc (or maybe laptop). That pc ran windows over 90% of the time, and you used internet explorer over 90% of the time. Like I’m not making this up, IE, the worst browser of all time, peaked at 95% market share in 2002.

Nowadays edge is a minor contender but a distant third (chrome about 70%, safari about 17%, edge about 5, Firefox 2.5). Windows market share still dominates on PC but has fallen significantly from 90+% in the 1990s to 75ish% for windows 10 and falling. Plus nowadays people don’t use PCs nearly as much. I’m on a phone right now, which is the dominant computing device (and windows phone was a joke)

Anyway in true American capitalistic fashion when they had this undeniable monopoly apple was a joke at the time and Linux was for extreme hobbyists and servers and such. So what did microsoft do? Destroy competition, destroy any political machinations that could threaten their future with hefty lobbying, destroy open standards in favor of their own proprietary bullshit, etc. Europe attempted some antitrust stuff against them similar to what is happening to google now (to forcefully break off IE from windows) but it was unsuccessful

So when you’re frustrated about the fact that tech does not play nice together? Does not adhere to open standards, forces proprietary bullshit on you, open displays anti competitive and anti consumer behavior? Blame microsoft and politicians that were grossly ignorant to a rapidly changing world (although to be fair you don’t have to be a tech genius to understand that computers being forced to work with each other and have transparency in how they work is beneficial)

And the next time you see some dork praising bill gates for being the “cool billionaire” because he has a charity remember that his wealth is built on these destructive practices. He lead microsoft through this period and this doesn’t even touch on how he destroyed countless businesses that dared to compete by leveraging the size of his company (eg draining their resources with lawsuits) rather than competing fair and square.

He personally fucked the landscape of technological advancement for generations on top of that because he had the arrogance to think that microsoft knew how best to handle it. Now it’s blown up and he doesn’t care because he got his bag. His charity is the same problem: he holds his wealth and decides what causes are worthwhile, like a king. Fuck him, and fuck all the technocrats that have no sense of ethics aside from “make me more money and do whatever I want”.

Global anti-trust efforts are simply not very strong and never have been. They make for boring political platforms and are constantly under attack by corporate actors.

Ideally no business should ever be allowed to grow to the point of being able to exert political influence at all let alone rival the power of small nations, but here we are.

Any rational enterprise will employ all and any anti-competitive practices that it can come up with - if it can get away with them. And the more influence the business exerts, the more it can get away with.

While I broadly agree with your sentiment,

Why can’t you compile Swift outside of MacOS

You can compile Swift on Windows and Linux. There are other tools required to build macOS and iOS-apps bundled with XCode that prevents building those on other platforms, but Swift itself is available standalone.

Because america is for the companies, not its citizens

 did license macOS out several decades ago. There were issues between hardware and software so they quit and brought it back under their umbrella so it’s integrated. That’s my understanding.  was nothing much when the iPhone came out.

Apple isn’t a monopoly.

In personal computing and smartphones, Apple has competition. Because Apple has competition, even if it is only one other major company, Apple won’t be forced to unbundle services.

What the hell rock have you been living under? Apple has been an abusive walled garden for many years.

You have to use WebKit on macOS

This is a lie. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?

Edit: downvoting won’t make your story true. You’re wrong and the existence of Chrome and Firefox proves that you’re an idiot.

Apple actually open sourced Swift language, and it’s available for other operating systems as well: https://www.swift.org/

Xcode is the app you need to use, if you want to submit your app to macOS or iOS App Store. You can build macOS apps with other tools, but you can’t distribute them in the App Store. There are developers who sell their apps through their own websites, or through other marketplaces, such as Steam. And while you can build iOS apps with other tools as well, it’s mostly pointless as you can’t distribute them, because iPhone doesn’t support sideloading. Jailbroken iPhones are an exemption to that.

Swift compiles anywhere.