What? You can host your own nextcloud instance and use it in the files app as a storage location and have all the same “save to” and “Read from” actions for documents that iCloud has. I use that and smb shares regularly and the only apps that don’t work with it are the ones who choose not to implement the apis for it. How is it monopolistic if Apple’s 1st party apps and software only work with their 1st party storage offering while allowing anyone to use the system api’s to connect and access any other storage service they want? Is it just them complaining that you can’t backup photos to anything but iCloud (except you can, by plugging it into any computer locally)? I really don’t understand, legitimately.
So don’t use iCloud and the photos app? What’s the problem here? There are plenty of third party camera apps and photo managers that could all use the same apis to access your directly integrated nextcloud storage the same way the photos app works. Hell, Plex offers automatic photo backups to your plex server! Y’all need to actually explain what this monopoly claim is in better detail. What am I not understanding here?