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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

Apple continues to not give any care whatsoever to anything outside their walled garden. For the longest time you couldn't even preview songs on iTunes store without having iTunes. Want to watch their biggest WWDC live? Had to use Safari until last year. Obviously iMessage and FaceTime are complete no-gos outside their walled garden too.

This is how they keep people in. They have to close down their walls as tightly as possible, to force people in. And once you're in, they make it as hard as possible to leave.

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>This is how they keep people in. They have to close down their walls as tightly as possible, to force people in. And once you're in, they make it as hard as possible to leave.

I call old wives tales. I'm a close-to-20-years Apple user. The walled garden has never been a problem, more of a strength (integration, cohesion, etc).

Especially today where everything is a subscription, there has never been LESS of a walled garden in that regard. I can move anytime (and I do use also Windows and Linux) and I wont have any issue with OS X/iOS.

I just wont have my apps -- which has been the case for every OS ever.

My music is in Spotify and Apple Music, my video is Netflix and Amazon Prime and Apple+, my email is Gmail, my eBooks in Kindle for Mac and iOS, I talk with friends with Skype, Facetime, Messenger and Whatsup. Even my iCloud apps (Calendar, email, etc) are available from any browser.

Some "walled garden".

The reason I don't want to move from OS X/iOS is cohesion and usability. Despite BS like the 3+ years MBP keyboard fiasco or the not-really-useful BS touch strip, it's still the best HW/SW combo for my kind of computing (programming, lots of UNIXy stuff, lots of video and music as well).

> My music is in Spotify and Apple Music, my video is Netflix and Amazon Prime and Apple+

Does Spotify somehow integrate with Apple Music and Netflix with Apple+? Because, if not, your counterargument is just "there's no walled garden because I'm outside it".

Spotify, Netflix, Google, Kindle, etc work on both platforms. Apple stuff doesn't. That's the definition of "walled garden", that you can't use Android and still use any Apple stuff.

FWIW Apple Music does work on android, reasonably well too. I switched to that when it became apparent that Google Play Music is a dead product, soon to be sent to the glue factory.

Do you know if Apple Music is available on Windows? I know iTunes has been on Windows for years, so I assume it supported Apple Music initially, just like on the Mac?

They currently have a web player beta going, https://beta.music.apple.com/, but personally I use https://vusic.site/ because the apple beta is a little unstable and it suits my needs.

iTunes for windows does support Apple Music, but iTunes is still a pig and best not installed on your PC.

I believe iTunes for windows is still a thing and it supported apple music when I tried it last year.

iTunes as a software is horrible though

Why do people use Apple Music over Spotify?

One reason I use Apple Music over Spotify is that Apple Music is entirely supported by paying customers rather than by ads. This aligns thier incentives more closely to mine.

Spotify was a hassle when I tried to sign up for an account (I don't recall exactly, it's been a few months, but some sort of technical glitch), and I didn't have enough desire to chase it down just so I could give them my money. So I've stuck with Apple Music because I can't justify to myself or my wife (we have a family plan) how Spotify would be an improvement. I was willing to try it out because my Tesla has a built-in player for Spotify, but I've just been using the Tesla streaming instead (when not Apple Music) and I'm happy with it.

I was using it because it had voice command support and Spotify didn't. Was pretty important when 100% of my use was while driving. I think that's changed and Spotify has support now but I don't know how smooth that is.

I don't use spotify for a few reasons. Primarily being I can't add my own music to my library and stream it (you kinda can but it's sub-optimal), second being comfort and usability. You can't easily rearrange your play queue in spotify, while apple music and GPM make this quite easy (including "play next" and "play later" for adding to the front and back of the queue). I find radio stations much better on Apple Music and GPM, Spotify's radio stations/algorithm just don't do it for me.

no ads plus much much more music, especially if you’re into subgenres of electronic music. i haven’t found a song yet that i haven’t found on apple music. they were one of the (if not the) original music store after all

>Does Spotify somehow integrate with Apple Music and Netflix with Apple+? Because, if not, your counterargument is just "there's no walled garden because I'm outside it".

No, my argument is "there's no walled garden because with subscriptions there are no walls to close you in".

Apple Music is a subscription, you move to Spotify or Pandora or Youtube Music or whatever and that's that. You don't have the loss of your music or whatever locking you down to either OSX/iOS or even Apple Music alone as the parent said. That would be an argument back when music was DRM files you have bought and which would have stopped working outside Apple's ecosystem.

Ditto of course for Netflix, Mail, etc.

The closest you can get to the "walled garden" is iBooks -- Kindle wont display books you've bought there. But you can trivially just use Kindle app on macOS/iOS and problem solved. Apple's not forcing you to use iBooks.

> You don't have the loss of your music or whatever

You just lose playlist and ratings

> you can trivially just use Kindle app on macOS/iOS

Except Apple cripples features of the Kindle app (you cannot buy books through the app because if you did, Apple would demand a 30% cut that represents all of the Amazon profits) that are not crippled in Apple's own offering.

>You just lose playlist and ratings

Yes, so peanuts (most people don't even use ratings according to some article I've read - it's for the OCD music nerds, not the millions who just listen to hits and might or might not add some playlists - of which they don't really obsess over).

>Except Apple cripples features of the Kindle app (you cannot buy books through the app because if you did, Apple would demand a 30% cut that represents all of the Amazon profits) that are not crippled in Apple's own offering.

That would be Amazon's crippling it, as it's their choice. They could pay that 30% cut. They themselves demand a 65% cut from authors and publishers at worst case, and 30% (same as Apple) at best.

And again, both very ho-hum example of barriers to move platform.

If stuff like "I'll lose my playlists" is what prevents someone from leaving Apple, then that's the most open walled garden ever...

AppleTV+ is also available on the web and on Roku and Samsung TVs. So again, not a walled garden even when using their products.

Oh okay, if it's on Samsung TVs that's pretty much FOSS levels of openness, I agree.

Your reply here seems to try to twist the thread to a point where all uses of 'open' or 'non-walled' has to equate FOSS or EFF ideals, while you probably know that is neither feasible nor what is being discussed. It feels like you're intentionally acting obtuse at this point.

how about the $5k or so in media i have in googles ecosystem? their apps are literally garbage on ios and i had to resort to using youtube to watch content i paid for. even this didn’t work after some time as i have so much media even the youtube app started timing out when loading my purchases. there is no compatible format for ios, so you gotta use their garbage apps. it became such a huge problem that i bought everything that moviesanywhere didn’t already give me over again on itunes store just so i could have an actual file and, you know, actually watch the content i bought. google is substantially worse in their walled garden attempts

>how about the $5k or so in media i have in googles ecosystem? their apps are literally garbage on ios

I've never seen any Google app being a problem on iOS, much less garbage. It just doesn't have the native look due to Material theming.

read my post again, you clearly don’t have enough media to be a problem. on all devices both the google play app and youtube timeout or lock the device up due to the amount of media i have. garbage is an understatement considering how much i spent with them and that I can’t even view any of it anymore without watching on a full desktop / laptop

I feel like reason you can move is because you haven't put all your eggs in their walled garden, not that they don't have one. I know people who either won't or have regretted switching from an iPhone because they have trouble talking to their friend who only use iMessage. I think Apple is only increasing their walled garden into more areas by expanding into music streaming, TV, etc. You can still use their hardware and OS without fully buying into their walled garden though and maintain more freedom, as you seem to do!

edit: I should mention that while I don't like their walled gardens in general, I don't mind them for other people except iMessage. iMessage makes me fairly angry because they're using & dividing people's social connections for profit.

iMessage is the greatest thing to happen to text messaging since text messaging itself. I refuse to use any Facebook owned product to communicate; so, that pretty much only leaves me SMS and iMessage.

I think you should be pissed at bottom barrel Android manufacturers putting shitty messaging interfaces on Android phones more than Apple for having a good messaging system.

I have Facebook Messenger, Messages (iMessage), WhatsApp, Signal, Hangouts, Slack & Discord all installed on my iPhone. Why hold back?

Every app is another opportunity to get a tracker on your phone. I like to limit how many native apps I have installed whenever possible.

iMessage has done more to hold back messaging in the US than anything else. Even if Google was competent at messaging it wouldn't matter because iOS users wouldn't switch and Apple refuses to open up iMessage to non-Apple devices.

I'm still using SMS for most of my messaging, and I primarily blame Apple for that.

Are you asking for Apple to pay for infrastructure for non-customers to use? Or even further, that Apple design and support an Android iMessage app?

Yes, and I am a customer. I own a Macbook, and I would love to use iMessage on it, but doing so would mean losing all of my messages as soon as I pick up a different device. That makes iMessage (and most Apple services) completely useless to me, a paying customer.

Their decision to wall off iMessage actively hurts their own customers by preventing them from seamlessly communicating with the most popular mobile OS using modern technology. They get away with it because they're Apple and they make good products, but that doesn't mean I have to think it's good.

Google's messenger apps work on iOS..

Google makes money from advertising, Apple does not...

Google's incentive is to keep you using their platform across any device; because, that is what is in their best interest, they make their money from billions upon billions of small advertising interactions across a vast ocean of interconnected platforms and devices.

Apple sells physical devices, it's their incentive to make sure the experience is great for whoever bought that device. They make their money from selling billions of devices...

Apple's focus is on the "user," and Google's focus is on the "platform." Both have different types of lock-in, but have different reasons why.

I still lost how it's Apple's problem that the standard interface of SMS/MMS is just totally shitty and not capable of doing what people want. Complain to your telecommunication, handset, and operating system providers/vendors to build or enable a better open standard (like RCS or whatever it is).

If iMessage is a walled garden, then pretty much every other messaging system is also a walled garden since the death of XMPP. Can anyone build a a third party client for WhatsApp or any other popular messaging system in 2020? Im unaware of any. In fact the top result for “third party whatsapp client” is “Use a third party WhatsApp client and be banned for life”. [0] Hardly the behavior of an open system.

What your real complaint is that there isn’t an client for a nonApple operating system. It’s reasonable to not want to switch OSes, but there are many apps that are iOS exclusive, as there are many android exclusive apps, but I wouldn’t call them “walled gardens”.

Also, iMessage doesn’t make money. It an e2e encryption app with sms support. Because it’s provided by Apple, a company that famously makes money on hardware rather than services, there’s no incentive to mine your (and your connections’) data for profit, like say WhatsApp, or the others, so it is incorrect to claim they are “using & dividing people’s social connections for profit”. If anyone is dividing their connections based on iMessage, it’s your friends.

[0] https://www.cultofmac.com/314343/use-a-third-party-whatsapp-...

A bit of a late reply, but there were a couple of points that I wanted to respond to. The first is that I'm not holding up WhatsApp as a great example! I use, promote, and have done a bit of development on Matrix, a true open messaging system. If XMPP or IRC floats your boat, I'm all for that as well, and I'll be able to chat with you over the XMPP and IRC Matrix bridges because all 3 are open systems. Second is how high the wall of your walled garden is matters, and matters a lot. Sure I can't write my own WhatsApp client, but I can download the app relatively easily on both Android and iOS. To communicate with people over iMessage I would have to buy a different phone and accept everything that comes with it (including the rest of the walled garden, appwise, oswise, etc). Finally, when I said they were doing it for profit I meant that the fact that iMessage only works with Apple products makes it such that if you want a good communication experience with your Apple-only friends you also have to buy into the ecosystem, and once you have it's hard to get out because you might lose those connections.

> If iMessage is a walled garden, then pretty much every other messaging system is also a walled garden since the death of XMPP.

No whataboutism please.

iMessage is backwards compatible with SMS.

Are you talking about the unwillingness of users to migrate their chats to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc? That’s not a walled garden - that’s the natural hesitance to leave any comfortable/familiar system that any social media / network effect site/app has. It’s more like a psychological moat. And even the app you want Apple users to migrate to has it.

He's talking about the fact that iMessage only runs on Apple hardware. That's what a walled garden is.

ok? and googles messaging app only runs on android. the app doesn’t require the recipient to have imessage, however if they do you get benefits (like increased message size) over sms due to limitations in sms.

Which one? Hangouts runs on iOS. The one for SMS and MMS does not but does Apple even allow that?

hangouts is dead, so again can i run googles sms app on an iphone? further google killed xmpp support which would’ve allowed 3rd party clients to use their message services

I admit I haven't checked what Google's messaging offerings are this month.

iMessage with macOS works fine on non-Apple hardware. Perhaps you intended to write iOS and the iOS version of iMessage only runs on Apple hardware? Or was it more a point of legality? Or end-user acceptance? Or availability to the general public?

Is there an iMessage app my mom can install on her Android phone? It feels like you're intentionally acting obtuse at this point.

No, I'm just stating facts. iMessage runs on multiple Apple operating systems, and while you can't run the iOS family reliably on anything but Apple hardware, you can run macOS on non-Apple hardware.

I'm intentionally trying to point out that the generalised statement was wrong without context, while at the same time providing wording that would probably match the intended message instead of the one that ended up getting posted.

No, the statement was plenty right, I just wasn't expecting someone to read it in bad faith and then waste a bunch of time by nitpicking. If you're a mobile app manufacturer who owns a large platform, and your app doesn't run on the other large platform, you're a walled garden.

no it’s wrong and given your precious posts you’re obviously an apple hater. i hope you realize you’re not special and anytime an apple story comes out, your type crawls outta the woodwork to express their jealousy or whatever is the driving force behind your valueless comments. please go back to your android / windows / linux / haiku / whatever world and leave the rest of us in peace

Sure, you can climb in and out of a walled garden with a grappling hook, but that's not really the point.

>iMessage makes me fairly angry because they're using & dividing people's social connections for profit.

Can you point me to a company that doesn't do this? I would think "but $hardware to use $network" is preferable to "use $network for free, but sell everything you put on the $network"

Cohesion does not force you to lock your software to a single device. Why can Google Duo be available on iOS and Android, while FaceTime is locked to iOS? You know full well it's to force you and your family to stay inside the garden and stop you from leaving. Has nothing to do with cohesion.

> I'm a close-to-20-years Apple user. The walled garden has never been a problem.

Obviously it's not a problem to people inside the garden, that's the whole point. It's meant to be a problem to people who are outside, to get them to come in.

As someone who has never had any Apple product, every time I come anywhere near anything by Apple, it's nothing but issues. As mentioned above, any time I'm linked an iTunes album page, I can't do shit with it. I'm not going to install iTunes just to listen and purchase the album. Is it cohesion to force me to download and install a program to purchase an album?

I haven’t been able to get any one to use Google Duo. Isn’t it still only 1 on 1? Yes, it’s cross-platform, but if the cross-platform apps aren’t that good (Hangouts feels bulky, some other apps have more hoops to go through), that’s also saying something.

>The walled garden has never been a problem, more of a strength (integration, cohesion, etc).

>My music is in Spotify and Apple Music, my video is Netflix and Amazon Prime and Apple+, my email is Gmail, my eBooks in Kindle for Mac and iOS, I talk with friends with Skype, Facetime, Messenger and Whatsup. Even my iCloud apps (Calendar, email, etc) are available from any browser.

How do you actually benefit from the 'cohesion' in this situation, more say than my KDE/android setup which provides fairly seamless integration between my phone and computer?

One really egregious and incredibly frustrating example of a walled garden by Apple is the fact that I can't accept an invitation to view a shared iPhoto library unless I accept that invitation from Apple Mail. I'm using a Mac, I have iPhoto installed, there's no reason other than consumer-hostile behaviour to not allow me to accept that invite from Gmail in a browser. Hell, make me copy the link and paste it in iPhoto if I need to. Forcing me to use a particular e-mail client is just ridiculous.

And what company does care about the open web, no strings attached? Google and Facebook sure as hell don’t.

I’m not going to apologise for Apple, but I thought this sign in feature was iOS specific. They’re offering to proxy your email on their own account and buying an iPhone pays for that. It’s a privacy feature so that you can protect your personal email, it’s not federated auth.

A better example is that I think the Apple Music API is pretty robust now. That’s been some time in the making.

110% - Google wouldn’t let me use Safari for youtube TV or for Stadia. The open web is a total mirage.

Goes both ways. It shouldn't be too surprising that people don't bother testing against the only browser that isn't just a download away.

For all of IE's/Edge's faults (and there are tons), at least they offer public VM images.

> It shouldn't be too surprising that people don't bother testing against the only browser that isn't just a download away.

What does that mean? If you want to test Safari you only need a Mac or an iPhone, which Google has plenty of since they make native software for those platforms. If they want to test Chrome on a Mac, they can also test stuff with Safari on that same Mac.

> people don't bother testing against the only browser that isn't just a download away

Considering that a) Stadia officially supports macOS and b) most Google engineers use Macs, I don't think that's really a valid argument here. They just want people to use Chrome, full stop.

That does not apply to Google though.

Didn’t the Homebrew creator give some huge stat number for amt of Google employees who use Homebrew (so Mac) during the drama of him not being hired?

Most Google apps are available on both iOS and Android unlike Apple products. Compare Duo to FaceTime, Hangouts to iMessage, etc.

Stadia is still very early tech, it doesn't even support 90% of Android phones, let alone other devices and browsers. YTTV works on iOS, but yes the lack of Safari support is a bit shitty. Still, most of the limitation are technical, not forced.

If this feature were iOS only, how would you ever switch to a non-Apple device? Would you just have to leave all of your accounts behind?

I think this is meant for apps that ask for emails without really requiring them for the app to run. If you want to sync across devices, this is the wrong solution, because your random email isn’t random any more.

It’s not oAuth or SSO.

It's account federation, so no. You are still going to be able to log in with a local account or another federated authentication system.

Isn't this kind of in the DNA of the company? Even going back to its first decade, what distinguished Apple from other early PC companies was that its O/S was only meant to run on its hardware, and its hardware was only meant to run its O/S.

This obviously didn't work out for it in the late 80's and 90's. But its fortunes changed by the mobile device era. One challenge of this model is that you have to maintain execution excellence in not one, but two separate areas. Both your hardware and design execution, as well as your software engineering, have to be industry leading. If either one falls short, it brings down the other.

Ironically it didn't work out both ways: for a short time you could run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware, licensed and stuff, but all it did was hurt hardware sales while not making enough money to cover software engineering for the OS. Then again, a ton of stuff went bad for Apple at that time.

NeXT on the other hand was always intended to run on diverse architectures, not sure on the timeline vs. Windows NT, which had the same model (with the HAL, multiple kernels etc.). It's pretty sad to see that go away, but it also makes total sense; modularity and USP-as-a-service doesn't pay off and doesn't make users (the mass of them) happy. Loosely coupled but highly cohesive systems work best, it's why classic Mac OS completely failed in at the end of its life, and why all the other projects at Apple were a dead end compared to the *nix projects (and of course buying NeXT). It's also why NT worked, and why at some levels Android fails miserably. (but Google notices and started to fix the cohesion issue at the OS level with Android One and their patching methods vs. complete monolithic OS upgrades which then needs vendors to back port)

For this and many examples I think it's more ignoring those use-cases than maliciously blocking them.

> For the longest time you couldn't even preview songs on iTunes store without having iTunes.

I'm confused what the use case for this is?

> Want to watch their biggest WWDC live? Had to use Safari until last year.

Keynote streaming has had a long, weird history over the past decades. Even when Quicktime was dominant, they would only occasionally stream it live. My understanding over the past decade or so has been they've used "standards" to stream, but just the standards Safari had implemented. I just don't think they cared that much about getting it to any home users live.

> My understanding over the past decade or so has been they've used "standards" to stream, but just the standards Safari had implemented.

It's just HLS, which Chrome didn't support

I’ve long wondered why Chrome doesn’t support HLS (HTTP Live Streaming for those who don’t know) given that it’s been standardized for a while.

I get that we’ve got stuff like MPEG DASH and Web RTC now and so the use case for HLS is mostly fulfilled, but having a couple different options for streaming live video with low latency to massive audiences is nice and allows folks like me who have worked in this space to offer multiple options when designing a streaming systems.

Well, Chrome also "doesn't support" MPEG DASH: all of Chrome, Firefox, and IE11+ instead chose to support the Media Source Extensions API, which allows you to, with very little JavaScript glue, support any of these other standards you want, as well as new standards or custom streaming solutions. Apple, always the ecosystem's asshole, hardcoded HLS support into their browser and provided no way to implement any alternative as they refused to implement Media Source Extensions.

So no, Chrome should really not support HLS nor should it support MPEG DASH: Safari should just support Media Source Extensions. Apple finally did support Media Source extensions at some points on desktop Safari, which makes some sense as they effectively lost the war for the browser on macOS: no one was going to go to the ludicrous cost to support HLS (which would require you storing not just extra copies of all of your assets but also storing many copies of your audio as I am pretty sure HLS doesn't support separated streams) for Safari users given the existence and already-dominance of Chrome.

(FWIW, the cost of the duplicate storage was such a "bottom line" reason for websites to not support HLS that Apple finally decided to break a bit and support the MPEG DASH fragment files in Safari 10. It still is an extra implementation burden to support this hard coded spec and hobbles the entire industry to "whatever capabilities are sort of supported by HLS" instead of "whatever can be imagined on top of Media Source Extensions", but it no longer isn't "a major cost of our business operations is going to more than double".)

But, they still have not implemented it on iOS, because there they have control over the browser (disallowing any alternative) and are also a force in the mobile market you can't ignore (which is why this should be illegal). This means that you are forced as a content provider to support HLS so you can target iOS users (and before Apple lost, macOS Sadari), and that's the only reason anyone cares at all about HLS. HLS offers absolutely no advantages to MPEG DASH to anyone but Apple, and so would be dead if it weren't for Apple's active resistance to Media Source Extensions.

Keep in mind that while everyone always thinks that Apple does things to be an asshole or 'special' or whatever, it's far more likely that it was just coincidence or bad timing. Apply hanlon's razor and the wold is a whole lot less shitty.

Regarding HLS vs. the rest: HLS was developed around 2008 and published somewhere in 2009 IIRC, while MSE was at least 5 years later. At the same time; MSE has been supported since Safari 8 (macOS) Around 2015, according to WikiPedia, which is the same year FireFox gained support for it. Not sure about iOS.

Practically: Apple supports MSE and some DRM natively on the desktop just fine, and YouTube, Netflix etc. are using it at least since 2015 or thereabout. Also, most embedded video players in HTML5 just load a simple player framework that switches to the best available option. That might be MSE or HLS, but in the past it would also switch to Flash, RTSP and that windows media stuff.

btw, Chrome on Android supports HLS (for compatibility with lots of mobile HLS video content targeting iOS users). Pre-Chromium Edge supports HLS on Windows desktop.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ie/simplified...

Interestingly, Media Source Extension support was added in iPadOS 13 but not iOS.

HLS can be rather readily supported with a JavaScript library that works just fine on Chrome.

Imagine if Google would just "forget" to keep supporting H.264 on YouTube and only served VP9 unsupported in Safari and iOS.

I didn't want to get into it, but I was going to make the YouTube/Google comparison to keynote streaming an Apple. When YouTube moved off of Flash and added hardware acceleration, Chrome got first and best support with codecs and features compared to any other browser.

I did recently get a ticket where hls.js failed to render something that safari can play just fine, but it's the first time that's ever happened and the scale we're talking about it is massive. I kind of want to file a bug with hls.js

Oh there are Chrome extensions which inject JS HLS libraries, adding support to Chrome.

> I'm confused what the use case for this is?

I want to buy an album by an obscure artist that decided to only put their songs on iTunes. There is literally no way for me to by said album without downloading and installing a giant program.

They've seen fixed their web store and also split iTunes into pieces, but that was an issue for many years.

> Keynote streaming has had a long, weird history over the past decades

Sure but I'm not talking about decades ago, but even 2 years ago. In 2017.

> I just don't think they cared that much about getting it to any home users live.

Right, that's my point, they don't care about anyone outside their ecosystem.

Why would they care? What do they have to gain? While they are not the typical shareholder-directed company you'd normally see they are definitely still in it for the money. And since the market has shifted to services, ecosystem and larger user bases, there is no money or benefit to be gained from an investment to include people that are not your target audience.

That has shifted slightly since as a services company you can now make money without selling devices, and as other standards have become available (HLS was an Apple-only thing in the past, the rest had to use either Adobe or MS streaming stuff, unless you were into QTSS from 1995).

While there are plenty of things to like and dislike about Apple and what it produces, in the end, they are not going to care about people that will neither deliver money nor increased brand status.

Why does Google make Duo and Hangouts work on iOS and Android?

I'm sorry but outright making it hard for a non-significant subsection of people to buy music on your music store is just plain stupid. The only way to justify it is that losing such customers is worth it if it helps them keep their walled garden tight.

Because Google makes money by harvesting data and providing paid services to as many users as possible, while Apple makes money by selling a UX. It's much harder to sell UX to every possible market segment than to have varying degrees of UX and still make money off of just that. That's why the business models between them differ (just like Microsoft differs from both of them yet again - even if there are a lot of comparable practises).

> This is how they keep people in.

But sometimes, it also keeps iOS users out of stuff. For example, in Germany, Android has a market share of 70%. Hence, iMessage is useless here, because the majority can’t be reached. Thus, WhatsApp has the biggest market share for messaging services.

Now, it probably doesn’t matter for Apple, but it prevents the iMessage experience for most iPhone users in Germany, because it’s kinda useless here. I guess the same is true for most European countries.

> And once you're in, they make it as hard as possible to leave.

Nonsense. On my Mac, I can export all my pictures from Photos as jpeg (or several other formats); contacts as .vcf; calendars as .ics; documents in several portable formats; my music is in iTunes as (unencumbered) mp3 or m4a, nicely organised by Artists and Albums; emails are in traditional .mbox files, unless I'm mistaken, but at any rate mailboxes can be exported; even Messages are available in some directory in the Library folder, though in an ugly XML-y format; etc.

I don't know how easy other OSes make it to "leave", but you can't really argue that Apple is trying to make it hard (except by making the garden more beautiful, safe, and well organised than the others).

I use a mix of Apple and non-Apple devices. It's a shame that I can't, for example, use Safari on Windows or Android.

Firefox might be the answer or cross platform applications. Always good to get out of the ecosystem when you can.

I've been using Firefox for the last couple of months but I'm not satisfied with it. I'm using Brave now but it only syncs bookmarks... I'm using a password manager but it doesn't sync extensions, autofills, settings, etc.

What are your problems with Firefox?

Major issues:

1. Lack of multilingual spell checking (without having to manually switch languages). For non English natives this is a must since we write in at least 2 languages every day. There is an extension that tries to solve this but it is quite slow to the point that I've had to disable it.

2. It just feels slower than Chromium browsers and Safari, at least on macOS. In Windows it's blazing fast but I have a Ryzen 3700X there.

3. On my MBP I get random CPU spikes from time to time and I'm forced to close and reopen FF. I haven't seen this in my iMac or Windows machine. I've never experienced this with any other browser.

4. On Android FF seems to be a battery hog. I haven't done any serious measuring but since I switched to FF my battery has gone from 3-4 days between charges to 2-3 days.

Minor issues:

1. I think the UI is inferior to all other browsers

2. I've had sync issues. I try to login to a website and for some reason FF will not write the credentials unless I manually sync. This has happened in iOS and Android.

3. I've had several minor issues on iOS. For example yesterday there was a weird bug in Twitter with the keyboard suggestions. I know it uses WKWebView under the hood but Chrome for iOS does not have those issues.

4. For some reason Mozilla decided to remove an extension that I use very frequently called UI Stack.

I don't think major 2 is objectively true. Firefox is faster than Chrome in every benchmark test I've seen for two years now.

As for minor 4, the blame is with developer. The API that was eliminated was EOLed long before they removed it, and it looks like he's doing some security violation https://github.com/gigobyte/ui-stack/issues/6

There used to be a Safari for Windows. No one used it so Apple dropped support.

More specifically, Apple never made it good enough compared to alternatives, so no one used it. It eventually died at the hands of its maker.

IMO what killed it was the text rendering. They brought their font smoothing over from Mac OS and that's not what Windows users are acclimated to.

It might be more "correct" in some ways, especially from a graphic design / typography standpoint, but it looks fuzzy when you put it next to ClearType on the same screen.

https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosoph...

https://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-apples-font-r...

Well, there was Mac GUI toolkit for Windows, which Safari and iTunes used, wasn't really Safari for Windows

I would rather have a delightful user experience than multi platform support. Worst service to ever come out of Apple is Apple Music because it is multi platform. Their desktop app is just a shell around their BETA web version. Sluggish UI, memory usage goes up to 4GB easily...They didn't even try...all in the name of making it easier to support multiple platforms.

Sounds like they did not make a modicum of effort to support any platform.

iTunes was multiplatform (Windows & OS X), if Apple wanted they could invest the resources to do so for Apple Music. Apparently it is not a priority tho

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