Yes, but that somehow doesn’t change anything ever. They do horrible thing A, world is shocked about A, then they do horrible thing B, world is shocked about A+B, then they do horrible thing C, world is shocked about B+C (A has already been forgotten by that point). And so on. We don’t really have proper checks & balances in place against malicious politicians with too much power and too many loyalists in key positions. So they can do whatever and get away with a ton. I mean I thought there should be checks and balances working to correct this in any modern democracy but then again checks & balances also fail regularly in other areas, e.g. in anti-corruption or in pro data protection. Everything’s conveniently broken in some way and can be exploited. The key people from the Trump administration and/or Heritage Foundation should already be behind bars for lifetime.

That’s only true up to a certain size. If Ground News ever grows big, they’ll still retain enough of a user base regardless of what they’re doing. Compare it to e.g. Meta, Google, MS services. Or even X. Many people just never leave once they feel at home there. Meta could do even more disgusting stuff and people would still use WhatsApp, Instagram, and the likes.

Why should I downgrade?

Apple’s stuff is:

• Locked down hard, meaning you get completely vendor-locked-in, and you can’t install alternative OS (there is none I think) or even apps from different sources without voiding warranty or using unsupported, unreliable hacks like jailbreaks for specific models.
• Privacy-invading. Sure, not as bad as proprietary Android distros, but still far from privacy-respecting
• Account-bound. Everything is tied to your Apple account. To even set up or use the product you need an account.
• As proprietary and closed source as it gets
• Ridiculously overpriced, so very low value for the money
• The company is known for its anti-competitive and monopolistic, even mafia-style behavior (e.g. when insisting on their 30% cut for all apps, insisting that apps use the in-app-purchasing system and not allowing “subscriptions from outside of Apple’s ecosystem”, stuff like that. If app developers don’t comply with ridiculous rules, they get their apps taken down, and since the AppStore is the only source for apps, this means they have 100% control and can kill any app which they don’t like or which they perceive as competition for Apple’s own apps.

Use GrapheneOS. It’s a secure, fully privacy-respecting open source distro of Android (based on the open source Android) without any Google services/apps by default, but with full Android app compatibility.