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It has been self evident for so many years that now that you ask I don't know what to say. Vendor lock-in is so ingrained that it actually defines Apple. Here

It has been self evident for so many years that now that you ask I don't know what to say. Vendor lock-in is so ingrained that it actually defines Apple. Here are a few examples: try making a backup of your iphone without icloud or itunes (or manual update of iOS, or restoration) try sending GPS coordinates to a non iphone try exporting your contacts to a non iphone When apple finally offered DRM-free music on the itunes music store but refused to licensed their ALAC lossless codec preventing the music to be listened on other devices until it was reverse engineered[1] try installing software on an iphone without using the app store and jailbreaking the iphone jailbreaking is actually made to remove the limitations imposed by apple to its customers integration only works with other apple products the list goes on [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.#Accusations_of_anti-competitive_behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.#Accusa...

koffiezet 9y ago
I've seen real vendor lock-in on corporate level, where in the worst case, the vendor of a client suddenly just did an x20 of the licensing price for the next year, for something that was already a very expensive contract. The client had no other choice but to pay up, moving to another solution would cost many times that cost. There is nothing Apple does that even remotely resembles such practices. I want to buy an Android? It'll take some time to migrate stuff, but I've done that before, it's not that hard, just time-consuming. It won't cost me multiple times the cost of buying another phone, and I won't lose any data. > try making a backup of your iphone without icloud or itunes Is offering a way to backup a device lock-in? It's the same as "oh no you have to use pg_dump to export a postgres database". Also, there are 3rd party apps you can use to backup your phone. And if you make local un-encrypted backups with iTunes, there are many tools to extract stuff like your messages history, and if you really need to - you can just find the right file, fire up sqlite and browse/recover them that way. > try sending GPS coordinates to a non iphone Whatsapp can do that, Google hangouts too - there's nothing stopping an app from doing that? What's your point? That you can't send an iMessage to a non-iOS device? I suggest you have a good look at all the alternatives, which can be installed without a problem on an iOS device btw. > try exporting your contacts to a non iphone I've done this on multiple occasions. I've had a harder time exporting contacts from Google than from iCloud/iOS devices. Apple simply uses the vCard standard. The App store would be a vendor lock-in if I could only install Apple made software from it, which is not the case. I use many competing services and apps on my Apple devices. And yes, ALAC was a problem for a while, but they did release the en/decoder source code under apache2 license in 2011. There are other things that smell a lot more like vendor lock-in: Siri and the maps integration in iOS, but again, that's more an inconvenience than a real hard lock-in.

koffiezet 9y ago

I've seen real vendor lock-in on corporate level, where in the worst case, the vendor of a client suddenly just did an x20 of the licensing price for the next year, for something that was already a very expensive contract. The client had no other choice but to pay up, moving to another solution would cost many times that cost. There is nothing Apple does that even remotely resembles such practices. I want to buy an Android? It'll take some time to migrate stuff, but I've done that before, it's not that hard, just time-consuming. It won't cost me multiple times the cost of buying another phone, and I won't lose any data. > try making a backup of your iphone without icloud or itunes Is offering a way to backup a device lock-in? It's the same as "oh no you have to use pg_dump to export a postgres database". Also, there are 3rd party apps you can use to backup your phone. And if you make local un-encrypted backups with iTunes, there are many tools to extract stuff like your messages history, and if you really need to - you can just find the right file, fire up sqlite and browse/recover them that way. > try sending GPS coordinates to a non iphone Whatsapp can do that, Google hangouts too - there's nothing stopping an app from doing that? What's your point? That you can't send an iMessage to a non-iOS device? I suggest you have a good look at all the alternatives, which can be installed without a problem on an iOS device btw. > try exporting your contacts to a non iphone I've done this on multiple occasions. I've had a harder time exporting contacts from Google than from iCloud/iOS devices. Apple simply uses the vCard standard. The App store would be a vendor lock-in if I could only install Apple made software from it, which is not the case. I use many competing services and apps on my Apple devices. And yes, ALAC was a problem for a while, but they did release the en/decoder source code under apache2 license in 2011. There are other things that smell a lot more like vendor lock-in: Siri and the maps integration in iOS, but again, that's more an inconvenience than a real hard lock-in.