I'm not seeing where you're demonstrating that Apple only affects people who "choose to buy into the Apple ecosystem" but gmail affects everybody.
I mean, there's truth to the idea that Google have more sway when it comes to trends on the internet, but when you say that a "a big email provider changing how email works", Apple could easily be the big email provider in that sentence
Because Apple owns its ecosystem. It owns iOS and the API apps use. It owns the app store.
Google doesn't own the email ecosystem. It's a decentralized system where thousands of actors exchange messages using standardized protocols. The last people who did what Google is doing were Microsoft. Remember winmail.dat? Remember the various hacks and options that litter open source mail clients and POP/IMAP servers to work around quirks and bugs in Outlook?
Just looking at my muttrc I find:
# MS Outlook seems to like sending emails using cp1252 but setting the
# charset to iso-8859-1
charset-hook ^iso-8859-1$ cp1252
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Dovecot has a bunch of custom options as well. That's what happens when a major actor starts disrespecting the standards, out of ignorance, out of hubris or out of spite.
Between that and how Google seems to want to force Chrome down everybody's throat at all costs it really seems that somebody at Alphabet found an old Microsoft "howto" from the late 90's and decided that was a good plan.
>Apple could easily be the big email provider in that sentence
I don't understand, are you saying I shouldn't criticize Google for doing something because I don't criticize Apple for not doing it? Trust me if Apple ever pushes some custom "iMail" format I'll say the same thing.
I mean, there's truth to the idea that Google have more sway when it comes to trends on the internet, but when you say that a "a big email provider changing how email works", Apple could easily be the big email provider in that sentence