I think the focus here is on the wrong thing, the "app", which makes ideas like legal intervention and other distractions feel relevant. I think client interch

I think the focus here is on the wrong thing, the "app", which makes ideas like legal intervention and other distractions feel relevant. I think client interchangeability and ultimately user freedom is fundamentally about data driven design, look at all the examples: text is text is text... git is a file based graph of merkle trees. They are both highly abstract, portable, unopinionated data structures that don't describe APIs, UI or implementation - don't like git CLI? you can literally write a completely different one with different porcelain and use the exact same git repos as everyone else, people have done this. Text is the same, it's just more obvious because so many examples exist. If you start with data and make it successful clients will emerge around it without the choice of making it interchangable. The problem with things like google docs isn't the app, it's the opaque data format. And then there are formats posing as being open and portable like DOCX which is essentially a proprietary microsoft format forced open due to reverse engineering - all of it's details will no doubt be closely coupled to the history of MS Word features and implementation.