There is nothing you can do to reduce the power of big tech until free software can provide an appealing option for regular people.
The best thing you can do to help is pick a problem that stands in the way of regular users adopting free software and dedicate yourself to working on it for 10 years. I don’t mean quit your job. I mean just keep the long game in mind. If you don’t have the skills now, start anyway and learn them as you go.
If a just few thousand people did this, the world would change a lot in a decade. If a decade seems like a long time, it is less time than it took either the iPhone or Facebook to become what they are today, and both of them took relentless effort by developers.
I don’t off hand, but it is an excellent question.
An obvious area that iOS and Android are more mature than the FOSS alternatives is accessibility. You could easily spend 10 years just marshaling a project in that area.
Another obvious area is data persistence across devices. I’m sure there is a better name for this, but what I mean is that signing in to an iOS device is pretty much all that is needed for my data to start appearing. Apps and data will be populated from the cloud, whether it is from iCloud Drive or from a backup. Losing, upgrading, or adding a device has very little impact on workflow other than the cost of hardware.
This is an extremely valuable and sticky feature, and is part of what makes these devices into consumer ‘appliances’ rather than traditional computers.
The architecture to achieve this in Apple’s case is exactly where most of the complaints are targeted. E.g. the App Store, iCloud backups, and other services like photos.
The challenge is to engineer a set of alternatives that yield similar end-user benefits, but without creating dependence on a trusted (or distrusted in Apple’s case) central actor.
This seems to me like another area where many people could spend 10 years working.
The best thing you can do to help is pick a problem that stands in the way of regular users adopting free software and dedicate yourself to working on it for 10 years. I don’t mean quit your job. I mean just keep the long game in mind. If you don’t have the skills now, start anyway and learn them as you go.
If a just few thousand people did this, the world would change a lot in a decade. If a decade seems like a long time, it is less time than it took either the iPhone or Facebook to become what they are today, and both of them took relentless effort by developers.