It's more then reliance on smartphones, it is reliance on people having a Google or apple account to actually download the app.

That's a large factor worse. The digital identity wallet has as one of its spear points privacy, but it forces you to have that big tech privacy slaying account.

It's a privacy tying sale.

So a broader philosophical take,

Before the middle ages, you'd make your own product. That turned into local production, mass productio, but still devices could be desicected and analyzed how they worked. A car from the 60's as an example.

So for the most part of our society, reverse engineering was possible. It is only the last decades with closed source software that the opposite is occuring. But did 'we' ever made this a consious decision? Or our we sucker punched by progress

+1 on this. This is a privacy tie in sale. You buy product x, but after the buy it turns out it only works when you also accept the terms and conditions of product y.

Normally tie in sales are illigal, but because it happens in the digital world, we/they fail to notice...

Its banks, but also government and health (the dutch digi-d app), food markets, schools, more and more

If there is a EU DMA, where is an independent app store?

When you have an unfair system, every technology advancement will benefit the few more than the many.

So off course AI falls into this realm.

what's fair? how do you measure fairness?

The blog still assumes that AI does not affect Mastery. I think it does.

All the AI junk like Agents in Service centers that you need to outplay in order to get in touch with a human, us as consumers are accepting this new status quo. We will accept products that sometimes can do crazy stuff because of hallucinations. Why? Ultimate capitalism consumerism sheepism, some other ism.

So AI (and whether it is correlarion or causation, i dont know) also corresponds with lower level of Mastery

True, but only when you login with your Apple account.

Which kind of defeats the purpose for some parts