Apr 29th, 2024 - Category: Apple
How hard is it to leave Apple’s walled garden? It turns out that it is very hard even for the technology saavy. What’s worse, because the walls have grown slowly over many years, the magnitude of the effort gets hidden behind the proverbial beautiful trees lining the walls. “Wow, my iPhone photos are already on my MacBook!” “Great, I can use my iPad to respond to the text message I received on my iPhone!” “Phew, my Apple Watch can provide turn-by-turn directions from Apple Maps!” This video from Marques Brownlee’s popular YouTube channel provides an excellent summary of the issue and highlights several negative consequences.
As a result, both the US and EU have begun legal proceedings to regulate Apple. For more details, The Verge published the articles “US v. Apple: everything you need to know” and “The walls of Apple’s garden are tumbling down.” And in their website today MacRumors reported “iPadOS Identified as Digital ‘Gatekeeper’ Under New EU Tech Rules.”
But what is it REALLY like to try to leave Apple’s world and use alternatives? Here’s is my recent experience with moving from Apple Music to Spotify. Apple Music includes a feature called “iTunes Match” which “gives you access to all of your music on all of your devices, even songs that you’ve imported from other sources such as CDs.” But Apple does not explain that the hundreds of CDs from our music collection that I laboriously imported as MP3s 20 years ago got “automagically” converted from MP3 to M4V (an Apple proprietary format) without our consent. This conversion reduces storage requirements on Apple’s servers. Why store the tracks from “ABBA’s Greatest Hits” for millions of users when Apple can convert the track I imported on my computer to Apple’s format and only store it once? On the negative side, this meant re-converting all those tracks back to MP3 so they can be used with any music app in the future.
The next task was deleting those tracks from Apple Music. This part was simple, “Select All” songs and then “Delete.” What happened next? All those tracks also got deleted from my wife’s and my iPhones, iPads, iMacs, and MacBooks including all the playlists that included those tracks.
The only option to fix this was nothing short of recreating our entire music library: copying the MP3 files to each iMac / MacBook, re-importing those tracks into the “Music” app, and then recreating the playlists. Once this was done each iPhone and iPad had to be re-synchronized with the “new” music library, a process that took a couple more hours. In the end, all the “metadata” was gone including album art, playlist order, etc.
And this is the process we went through to leave just ONE Apple service. Most people use iCloud Drive, iCloud Photos, Messages in the Cloud (for text message sharing between devices), Contacts, Calendars, Notes, Reminders, Safari Bookmarks / Passwords, Wallet, and Apple Maps. The Apple Card is a particular offender since Apple does not allow moving an Apple Card from from one Apple ID to another. The balance has to be paid, the funds in Apple Cash / Apple Savings have to be withdrawn, and the accounts closed then reopened with a new Apple ID. Moving from iOS to Android is even a bigger problem, we purchased our first app with our first iPhones over 15 years ago! Who wants to tackle the challenge of switching all their apps to a new smartphone platform? And then there are the whole “blue bubble versus green bubble” and FaceTime compatibility issues to consider as well. With 1.5 billion iPhone users around the world, Tim Cook’s suggestion to “buy your mom an iPhone” probably doesn’t go over too well with regulators.
As I’ve written about many times before, Apple does have an excellent track record of privacy and security. Also, they have done much of the basic innovation in the smartphone industry so they certainly deserve to be rewarded in the marketplace but as a $2.7 TRILLION dollar company, the danger of stifling innovation through their market dominance is very real. You can watch Marques’ video for a short list of suggestions that might help level the playing field and the articles linked to above have a more detailed exploration, but the bottom line is that it is time for the Apple’s walled garden to become a little more like a public park.