I'm not quite sure I agree with you. User data is always accessible - I can get pretty much every aspect of my iTunes library in XML and there are plenty of 3r

I'm not quite sure I agree with you. User data is always accessible - I can get pretty much every aspect of my iTunes library in XML and there are plenty of 3rd party programs that can interpret it. Contacts on your phone usually sync with your PC contacts app (Outlook on Windows, Contacts on Mac OS X) or via iCloud. You could use those apps to export. On Mac, it can be exported as an "archive" which is a bunch of plist XML which is parseable. You don't bulk export directly from your phone because, I don't think too many people have ever asked for such a feature (beyond vCard, which does work easily). Basically it seems to be sour grapes that consumers are finally getting what they want after 20 years of geek rule... It's not quite the 80s again.