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.
- 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