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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's "easy", but it's a lossy process. You lose all your purchased iOS apps, and have to manually buy the same apps (assuming they're available) on Android. If you watch the "See the steps" video, the fine print notes that Google can only "transfer" free apps that have direct equivalents (that is, released by the same developer) on the Play Store.

Your iMessage history disappears; Google can't transfer that to your Android phone. They claim to be able to transfer SMS/MMS history, which surprises me: I'm not sure how they accomplish that. I'm sure there's a ton of other user data that they also can't transfer. (Speaking of iMessage, any group chats you were in are now broken.)

Google of course has an interest in telling people that switching is easy and painless. It's not, though.

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Don't forget that getting Apple to stop intercepting your text messages is always a problem. I know a bunch of people who decided to try and switch to android, but they weren't getting their text messages and just went back to an iphone inside of a week.

I agree it’s lossy in some way. Most of the popular apps with purchases are tied to a login, so there’s a step of logging in again but the app is free to download.

Everything else you mention is part of the nature of changing operating systems: software incompatibility / unavailability. That never has and unfortunately never will be solved. It’s hard enough to keep old software working on new releases of the same OS.

But that's the point - it's not like, say, switching to a different car make. It is, indeed, non-trivial to switch phone platforms. So why shouldn't we recognize this fact and hold the companies in the market to a different standard?

It's "non-trivial" to switch to driving a 18-wheeler truck, or stick-shift transmission, or that funky wheel thing in Teslas, which don't support the same software that other car infotainment systems do.

You can't force everything to be uniform and support all of the same features to make switching between manufacturers of a product-class "trivial". How's that part of a healthy free market? Requirements to that effect kills all creativity and specialization of products for different purposes. Android and iOS are different and that's a good thing!

Apple collecting 30% off all purchases is not a feature, and being prevented from doing that does not make it impossible for them to differentiate otherwise.

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