>Any sort of basic interaction outside of their own ecosystem even through established standards and protocols is made difficult or impossible.

Weird. I interact with ALL SORTS of other systems via established or even proprietary protocols using my iOS devices.

>Case in point, I wanted to transfer a pic from an Android phone to an IPhone and was surprised to find that ios doesn't allow bluetooth file transfer!

This is the kind of thing that Android people like to complain about, but the complaint is based in a failure to appreciate that iOS doesn't work like Android.

There's only very limited interaction with the file system in iOS. This is by design. Complaining about that is like complaining that the original Mac had no command line. It's missing the point.

Sharing photos between phones is most often done via messaging or email. That works beautifully. In neither case is a third party service required.

There are additional avenues for photo sharing between two iOS devices, but those are features of the platform. It's not a failure of iOS that they don't work with Android.