> Well, you're using someone else's products (dev tools, compilers, OS libraries) you buy and license from them under certain commercial terms. If you don't like the terms, don't buy them.
This doesn't tell the whole story, because terms change. Even open source licenses change. Apple added Gatekeeper to Mac OS X in 2012. Before then, it was a pretty open platform. And other companies such as Microsoft and Google have been known to follow Apple in some respects, so just because one platform has better terms than another at the moment doesn't mean the platform owners can't change their terms on a whim. Apple/Google/Microsoft have close to all of the OS market share on both mobile and desktop, so it's not like there are a lot of choices, especially in the consumer space.
They can't change the terms on a product they have already sold to you, but new versions of the OS and dev tools are new products with new features. If you want the new features, you can choose to accept the terms, but you don't have to.
On the user side, there are security updates. Yes, you can refuse to install OS updates that patch vulnerabilities, but obviously that's a big problem for the user. And eventually the vendor stops providing security updates altogether for the hardware.
On the developer side, you can't really refuse to use the new versions, because they are required to support your software for the latest OS versions, which is where your customers will be. So if you don't, you lose your customers and go out of business, which is not much of a choice.
It's untrue that updates consist of nothing but new features.
This doesn't tell the whole story, because terms change. Even open source licenses change. Apple added Gatekeeper to Mac OS X in 2012. Before then, it was a pretty open platform. And other companies such as Microsoft and Google have been known to follow Apple in some respects, so just because one platform has better terms than another at the moment doesn't mean the platform owners can't change their terms on a whim. Apple/Google/Microsoft have close to all of the OS market share on both mobile and desktop, so it's not like there are a lot of choices, especially in the consumer space.