I think that this perspective certainly has validity. But I've also noticed a tendency towards making it too simple and this can lead to the sort of seeing-your

I think that this perspective certainly has validity. But I've also noticed a tendency towards making it too simple and this can lead to the sort of seeing-your-interlocutor-as-one-dimensional that OP is referring to. When it comes to ceding control of our devices to an authority, the choice hasn't always been between controlled and open, it's between Apple or HTC/Motorola/Samsung/Huawei and the mobile carrier. The situation may be improving, but it's still not great. For a host of reasons, some of them aesthetic and/or idiosyncratic, I'd rather give up a lot of control to Apple, because I know they won't give an inch of it over to Rogers, AT&T, or Verizon. It's true that buying an unsubsidized Google Nexus device sidesteps some of these problems, but large parts of the installed Android ecosystem seem to be more like feudalism than anarchy. Too often I think the people on the Android side of the discussion assume that iOS folks just lack an entire collection of values around openness that they personally consider really important. The reality is that the market is big enough for similar values to be catered to differently. I don't like that I can't delete Newstand.app from my iPhone, but just seeing a pre-installed and undeletable "Rogers Anyplace TV Live" icon on a friend's Android phone makes me die a little inside. A lot of folks don't seem to mind so much. There's no point in trying to convince each other which is worse, it seems mostly dispositional.