FaceTime and Messages (blue bubbles) are the only strong lock-in Apple has beyond brand effect. People don't buy iPhones over Android for Maps or Mail: they do it for the camera, FaceTime, and the blue bubbles. See the comparative market irrelevance of iPads, Macs, and other Apple products.

So you think FaceTime and “green bubbles” is the only reason that people spend more than twice as much on iPhones than Androids - even though cross platform chat/video call apps like WhatsApp and Messenger are far more popular - even on iPhones?

iPads are the only tablets that actually sell worth anything and the average selling cost of Macs are twice that of the average PC.

Also, the personal computer isn’t nearly as relevant as it use to be. Apple alone sells more iPhones than all consumer PCs combined and it only has about a 13% worldwide market share.

My case isn't representative: we did have the expertise and the funding, we built the native app, we found product-market-channel-model fit, and after I stepped away, they've expanded internationally and closed a Series A this year. For us, the impact was diverting tens of thousands of dollars to Swift

So you built an iOS app because of Safari and Apple’s evil lock in but you ended up spending money on an Android app anyway. So it was irrelevant because you couldn’t go to market with just a web app anyway....

They force developers to choose / balance resources between iOS and the web. Because the desirable users are on iOS, resources must be wasted on proprietary native apps instead of cross-platform web apps that would theoretically work on any device/OS.

But you just admitted that you had to end up building an Android app anyway because the performance of the web app was unacceptable. So even though Chrome supported the standards you needed, the crappy hardware on most Android phones made you produce an Android app.

I’m sure the desirable users only choose iPhones because of a FaceTime and “green bubbles”...

They specifically want to funnel apps through the App Store, so that they can gouge developers for 30%.

Again there is an existence proof that isn’t true. Not only does Apple not force app developers to go through their store for subscriptions - there are plenty that don’t - you can’t pay for a subscription to Zoom for instance through the App Store.

At this point Apple's anti-competitiveness has become undeniable. It looks like the Justice Dept is setting up to slam them for bundling/tying Safari to iOS as they did Microsoft with IE/Windows (the ruling that popped the dot com bubble).

There is an existence proof that you are wrong about the Justice Department “forced” Microsoft to unbundle IE and Windows. IE is still bundled with Windows over 20 years later.

For us, the impact was diverting tens of thousands of dollars to Swift development. At the time we saw this as merely technical reality: we also built an Android app for performance reasons.
That was years ago. By now, there should be many competitive video conferencing web apps that work across devices, and there aren't.

Swift wasn’t introduced until 2014. Any startup that was crazy enough to use Swift then was making a very bad decision. Also the performance and hardware of the average Android phone is still crappy.