Breaking away from ecosystem

A lot of the Apple appeal for me is/was the ecosystem- how everything seamlessly works.

Much like how I told myself when using Android that I could do whatever I want- without a clear picture of what the “whatever” was. I find myself in a similar situation with Apple ecosystem.

Most of the marketed features or advantages of being within the ecosystem are nothing more than Apple’s marketing getting to me.

Hype that got me:

• Copy in one device and paste in another device
• Sidecar - probably might be useful for creatives but have found no use for it yet.
• Continuity - starting a task in one device and completing it in another, a feature that is beneficial but hasn’t become second nature to me yet.
• Automatically connecting AirPods to the devices - this became an annoyance as soon as my iPad mini and phone became shared devices with my toddler. The airpods would decide to connect to other device (wish there was proximity based switching)
• iphone mirroring - Literally never used.

Things that will keep me locked in the ecosystem

• Passwords app - even though it is kind of limiting in the sense that I can’t use in on my windows/linux laptop. Having a password manager that syncs my passwords across all devices without subscription is nice.
• Notes app - I think there just isn’t an alternative for this in the Android eco-system.
• Safari - as it is the only browser that supports ad blocker on ios.
• SMS - most of my online accounts have 2FA enabled either in SMS or through authenticator app. And for the ones that use SMS the integration between Safari and SMS app where it automatically pulls the OTP in is just underrated. I think it would be one of the things that I would miss without knowing that I would miss it if I decided I wanted to breakaway from the ecosystem.
• iCloud - although it isn’t the best compared to some of the other services out there. Nevertheless having the iCloud be a first class citizen on your devices certainly helps.

I could possibly find ways to break out but lets just put it that I am lazy and with the 3 year contract on my new iphone I don’t want to think about it.

Through the lens