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Comment by orls | Hacker News Reader

That may be true, but having customers who want to only use products from one company doesn’t make that company a monopoly, which is the topic sitting behind this article.

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So then we agreed that final paragraph is irrelevant to the arguments of a monopoly. It’s misdirection from the fact that no one can build a competing quality product on their locked down platform. It has nothing to do with consumer choice because there is no choice. That is the monopoly, lack of ability to fairly build on their platform.

You act like Android doesn't exist. Consumers have chosen the Apple ecosystem and all that entails.

I’m not sure what Android has to do with consumers that limit themselves to the Apple ecosystem, based on the enforced belief that only Apple products work together. Of course you can switch to the Android ecosystem but how easy is it to do that and transfer everything over? You act like there aren’t huge limitations to what you’re suggesting a consumer should do.

But in many cases people, myself included, swapped to using Apple products because Android and Windows Phone were so much worse and had peripherals that interfaced way worse. I spent most of a decade on Android, paying essentially the same price as I would have on Apple, to get products that worked worse, lasted less time before losing official support, and interoperated worse even within the Google, LG, or Samsung ecosystems.

I ate the cost to swap off of Android (which also doesn't make it easy to get off of it, though maybe better than Apple) because I got value out of it.

And you have freedom to do that from Android. Now try to swap out of Apple, if you thought leaving Android was tough…

I did. I totally abandoned Apple once before, and I moved out of it for laptops in the last two years with no real disruption. I use almost no Apple services on my phone in a way that locks me into them. Most of the apps I use on iOS, I have subscriptions to some apps outside of Apple where they would transfer to Android just fine. I'd have to get a different fitness tracker, but I'd probably just not use one because all the Android ones I've used have been terrible.

By contrast, I still have 4 major Google services from my time in Android that I have yet to work out of my life - Maps, Gmail, Photos, and Calendar.

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