What would I take with me? My photos and email will move just fine. The last app I bought was a while ago, and it was an app to block Google AMP. I’m honestly not sure I use any other paid apps.
Also no iTunes, Apple Music, Apple Messages, Apple Pay, Apple Fitness, any kind of native Mac integration (Safari Bookmark sharing, Shared Bluetooth devices, clipboard sharing, Continuity Camera, AirPlay,...)?
No Apple Wireless charger, Apple Watch, Airpods, Apple-specific Accessories, Apple App-based carkeys or Apple CarPlay?
As an experiment I recently switched from iPhone (last 10 years?) to Android. It's been a little painful but:
- nearly all apps support Android as well. The ones I used (navionics, banking apps, WhatsApp) you just log in on Android, no cost involved.
- most Apple first party apps have a Google equivalent (google wallet, google keep notes, google messaging etc.) that is very similar
- my AirPods work equally well with android
Fine - but that took Google billions and a decade of work to reach near-parity. A new entrant will not have any of that. Web apps can do much more than they could 10 or 15 years ago but still takes massive effort.
Google's been ahead of Apple on tons of core user-facing features since the start (widgets, backgrounds, folders). The two platforms have extremely slowly converged to near-total feature parity. The only "advantage" of Apple's total ecosystem lock-in is relative seamlessness due to the vertical integration between their various services.
The thing is, it's barely any harder to set up an equivalent Google/Android ecosystem and has been for well over a decade as well. The real issue on the Google side of things is the renaming/shifting of services. Messages -> Gmail Chat -> Talk -> Duo -> Messages, Google Play Music -> Youtube Music, etc.
Do you use MFA? How about meetings (zoom/teams)? What about MS Office or Google Apps? Is the new email client up to snuff? All of these are much better as apps.
Users do not want to browse the web on mobile for all their activities, when Apps are generally faster, more secure, and has all their prefs recorded EVEN if a webapp is functionally equivalent (and most are only 70-90% equivalent)
So the new entrant has to curry favor with all these large software vendors (some of whom are now competitors) and offer something for some key uses of a smartphone.
You're right that apps can be better, but phone apps seem to always miss functionality compared to desktop web versions of the same thing. Even phone web version of Google doesn't have functional parity with desktop web Google. The phone app for Google is even worse.
Also no iTunes, Apple Music, Apple Messages, Apple Pay, Apple Fitness, any kind of native Mac integration (Safari Bookmark sharing, Shared Bluetooth devices, clipboard sharing, Continuity Camera, AirPlay,...)?
No Apple Wireless charger, Apple Watch, Airpods, Apple-specific Accessories, Apple App-based carkeys or Apple CarPlay?
That's quite rare.