[cforrester]

> It’s tough because Google and others are huge, they buy out competitors, it’s not anything like the restaurant market.

Not just that, they go to great effort to lock you into their ecosystem so that the difficulty of changing becomes a big part of the calculation.

If I had to make a comparison, instead of a restaurant, I'd suggest a company town. When you buy a Company X phone, you're moving to Xville, where everything is sold with predatory prices and low variety by the company store.

[SllX]

Their lock-in amounts to “be more appealing in some ways”.

Is there anything you couldn’t replace switching from your platform of choice to a different one? I have a lot of 3rd party software it would be difficult to replace and it would be a quality of life hit, but software is software, I could replace what they do with something else if I was forced to.

[saurik]

The way their payment system and marketing rules are designed--and I know this isn't some complex-to-solve problem as I actively ran a popular app store that did not have this user-and-developer-alike-hostile feature--prevents "porting" purchases, so if you buy a bunch of apps on iOS you are forever locked into iOS unless you want to repurchase all of them for Android: this is purposeful lock-in.

[cforrester]

You said it yourself, switching would be a complication, and manufacturers are happy to maximize that complication as much as possible. I consider it unethical to impose artificial hurdles to switching upon consumers, especially when they most likely aren't familiar with vendor lock-in.

iMessage is a good example for me. It replaces a federated, universally-compatible service with a centralized service that works only on Apple devices. The upgraded features are nice enough to be alluring, and now a significant portion of American smartphone users feel compelled to remain with Apple so that they don't experience any difficulties communicating. This is a sticking point for me in particular; I used to be a heavy user of multi-protocol messengers like Trillian, during the time when multiple providers offered mutually incompatible messaging services.

[hypertele-Xii]

Usually vendor lock-in actually amounts to "smart and well paid people think of clever, evil, but technically legal ways to make it as difficult as possible to leave the ecosystem".