are they worth it if you already can use pgp?

If you communicate with people who don't use it, yes. In my experience that's the vast majority of official dealings.

spoken like someone holding their nokia in the 2000s asking who would change their usd$1200 e60 or Blackberry for an iphone just because of "apps"

Well to be honest, aside from Apollo, those phones did everything I want from a phone and had better keyboards...

apple own your phone. they can decide to allow bard, bing, alexa to access you calendar or be able to automate things... or not.

that strategy already worked for search. they don't have it, so they make others pay to be there, and it net them 1bi a year from google.

next i guess they will just get 1bi from whover for the privilege of serving all siri replies.

until people ditch iphones, or merely push back to owning the device, apple will win no matter what.