I understand the loss of being stuck with a single platform, but that's not quite right. You can have multiple devices, just as you can shop at multiple superma

I understand the loss of being stuck with a single platform, but that's not quite right. You can have multiple devices, just as you can shop at multiple supermarkets. It's just that the price for doing so is higher (syncing multiple devices, carrying them around, the initial outlay), so most people don't. Nobody forces you to buy either Apple or Android. But the services they provide are indeed valuable: the walled garden protects me from certain kinds of harmful software, for example. The duopoly in smartphones is an outcome of the underlying technologies. That doesn't mean it is efficient in the economic sense, compared to an ideal world, but the comparison has to be what we can actually implement.