jh7459 I'm not sure why you have asserted that Microsoft don't want people accessing Teams data through APIs for fear of people using this capability to build a competitor product... Surely if we're relying on the APIs, Microsoft would still benefit from people having to pay to access the service in the first place to be able to set presence data or whatever else people want to do with the API. It's not like using the API can circumvent license fees...
I think a less cynical thought process might be that Microsoft are more than happy for us to access data (otherwise they wouldn't have created the Microsoft Graph), and they're more than happy for us to access presence data (otherwise they wouldn't have created the ability to do so with delegate permissions), they just have some kind of technical impediment that means it's hard to do with application permissions and they don't want to spend the time fixing technical debt unless enough people get behind the request.
I don't know how repeatedly suggesting the same "Microsoft don't want you to have access to the data", "Once a monopoly, always a monopoly" etc... contributes anything useful to this thread. Other contributors are trying to suggest ways in which application permissions to read/write Teams presence data would be useful to them. One has also suggested that a new API permission has appeared but doesn't work as they might have expected. In my mind this shows either an uncanny coincidence, or perhaps that Microsoft are actually working on implementing what the community very clearly want to see.
As a final thought on the matter, have you heard of Azure Communication Services, a service offering by Microsoft that exposes the same platform used by Teams to allow the development of applications that use voice calling, video calling SMS, and other such communication experiences? If ever there was an indication that Microsoft are opening up, rather than closing us out, this would have to be it.
I hope that eventually the app permissions for presence will be introduced and help reassure you that Microsoft have changed - they're not now the business that they once were. There's much more work on standards, open APIs, collaboration with the open source community, focus on cross-platform - in my opinion, they're more open than they've ever been.