And if they'd bought one, and were unhappy about some aspect of that, you'd be here and write "But it's not your decision to buy an iPhone?". We don't live in a world were you can get your perfect choice with no compromises, and having made a compromise does not imply that you can't criticize decisions made by the system you choose.

A significant % of people who buy iPhones are not able to make a truly informed decision about this at the time. They find out way later what the actual consequences of apple or google's walled gardens are, and can only escape the garden if they have an android phone with an unlocked bootloader

It's not cheap to swap ecosystems

> A significant % of people who buy iPhones are not able to make a truly informed decision about this at the time

I mean the devices change year to year but are people seriously finding themselves surprised by what iPhone can do but Android can't or vice versa?

If we were talking about a college tuition loan or a mortgage then yeah I'd say `not able to make a truly informed decision about this at the time` but this is like the lowest stakes decision possible no?

> It's not cheap to swap ecosystems

Is that true? Seems like there is always a nearly free phone deal out there and your network will probably migrate everything for you anyway.

FWIW, in my case, I would also lose access to all of the books, music, movies, and--very notably--apps that I have purchased over the years.

Music you purchased has been DRM free since 2008.

Most of the studios participate in MoviesAnywhere meaning a movie purchased on iTunes automatically shows up in your Amazon, Google, Vudu, etc library.

How many apps that you purchased that have an Android equivalent aren’t based on cross platform subscriptions?

Walled garden policies make full migration not possible, at least for free. Things like your music library, ebooks, in-app currency, etc are often not allowed to move.

If I were to move to iPhone now, I'd have to spend at least a hundred bucks finding and buying alternative apps.

> If we were talking about a college tuition loan or a mortgage

Why are you giving examples where all of the terms are explained completely, up front, by law?

Where is this narrative coming from? Only about 20% of App Store revenue coming from non game in app consumables (came out in the Epic Trial) and the other big money makers are from services like Netflix and Spotify where you can easily use your app cross platform. Even Apple Music is available for Android.

Most users aren’t complaining about any “walled garden”

Buying an Android phone certainly allows you to run other browsers that use their own rendering engines, but Android is hardly open; you are still restricted in many ways from doing what you might want to do, with little recourse. Installing a third-party OS image is possible, but then removes your access from some things that you might still like (any app that requires SafetyNet to pass, for example).

The bottom line is that there is no open phone platform out there that even remotely provides feature parity with Android or iOS. Anything you do is going to be a trade off, and for some people, there is no way to satisfy 100% of their needs and wants. That doesn't mean we aren't allowed to complain about the bits that can't be satisfied.