The Apple eco-system is definitely nice, but I think it’s over-played.
It took a lot of work and effort to migrate my ex’s photos off of her iphone and onto an actual hard drive. They funnel the average person into their cloud services with proprietary file extensions, low storage space, the asinine problem of having to have the phone open and unlocked for files to transfer to third party apps, thanks Nextcloud on IOS, and cheap introductory fees.
I’m literally helping my wife with this as we speak. The 1000 photo at a time limit to download from iCloud is pathetic! Google’s solution is SO much better.
Side note - You mentioned Nextcloud… If you’re self hosting, take a look at Immich. It’s a self-hosted Google Photos clone with Android and iOS apps that has very active development and is insanely quick at loading large photo libraries/thumbnails (unlike Nextcloud).
For casuals with Windows computer, they can install iCloud, and sync and make them available for offline use on their computers. This is basically like any popular cloud services out there except Google, that has Takekout
proprietary file extensions
What file extension is that?
Perhaps he means heic (not proprietary yet not used much outside of i-devices)
Recently made the move wholesale from IOS/iPhone Mini/iPad to a Galaxy Fold 4. Wasn’t hard at all tbh, plenty of tools for migration since most stuff is cloud-based. Took maybe a day to settle in. I’m fortunate in that I’m not dependant on icloud and the like though, my password manager is bitwarden, etc.
This is after starting on iPhones about a decade ago in high school. First android was trivial to get used to. I think the “myth” of apple lock-in keeps way more people in the apple ecosystem than lock-in itself.
