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Comment by tpmoney | Hacker News Reader

I feel like it would be easier to believe that Apple locking down access to things is the problem if anything at all comparable to their experiences existed outside. Yet whenever this discussion comes up, the answer to “why not just use Android’s ecosystem” largely seems to be that no such similar experience exists for Android. But why would that be the case if this was about Apple locking stuff down? Surely if a lack of open phone OS and feature access was the problem, we’d see a rich ecosystem of integrations that exist on Android devices that are just impossible to achieve on iOS right?

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see a comprehensive and more open integration ecosystem for non-Apple devices, if only to encourage Apple to keep building. But it doesn’t exist now, why would I expect it to exist if Apple is also open?

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> Surely if a lack of open phone OS and feature access was the problem, we’d see a rich ecosystem of integrations that exist on Android devices that are just impossible to achieve on iOS right?

It's entirely possible on Android? Pebble used to have decent integration with Android, from notifications/calls, to music controls, to sports tracking/health data. You could even get navigation integration! And that was a decade ago. That's what makes it so painful: the pebble android experience is really nice and integrates very well, while the iOS one is terrible due to the Apple lockdowns.

garmin watch works like this at the moment on android and subpar on ios

> Surely if a lack of open phone OS and feature access was the problem, we’d see a rich ecosystem of integrations that exist on Android devices that are just impossible to achieve on iOS right?

...yes, and that's exactly what has happened. Android has a thriving ecosystem of excellent smartwatches (Garmin, Pebble, Fitbit, Samsung & Pixel watches, etc) with lots of features (particularly around notifications and interactions with apps on the device) that are impossible to support on iOS. https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-... has some concrete details.

So what is the problem needing to be solved then? If there’s a thriving open ecosystem, that currently enjoys the majority of the market share in the EU per other commenters in this discussion, and the only way to get “locked in” to the closed ecosystem is to buy a phone and 100% of your accessories from a single minority vendor, why is this a problem? Why don’t people just chose the more popular, more diverse, open and thriving platform?

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