What's nice about each of the Apple, Google, and Amazon ecosystems is that the devices all work seamlessly within the ecosystem. This is much harder to do across companies.
Take for example, Beats headphones integrate seamlessly with the iPhone, MacBook Pro, and AppleTV.
Or Nest integrating with Google Home
Or Ring integrating with Amazon Echo.
There are tradeoffs to be made that benefit the consumer.
Huh what? At least the large brands have pretty much zero issues.
The exception is battery power indicators (AirPods don't show power level on Android phones, and JBL's PartyBox and Anker's SoundCore don't show power level on iOS/macOS devices), and for older wired headphones the behavior of the buttons may be weird depending on if they have been designed for Apple or for Android.
sound quality is potato level in calls, though.
Apple headphones "just work" with Apple devices.
You can switch audio from your phone to your Apple TV with a single confirmation click. No need to unpair and then manually initiate a connection on your desired device.
I don't know how competition law enforcement is going to make Bluetooth work better?
But your solution would be to make Apple technology worse?
You will get problems if you buy no-name things from Amazon, but you always get problems when you buy anything no-name off of Amazon.
You will also get problems if you use Linux of course (even with good headphones), but that obviously goes without saying. Yes yes I am sure you can get Bluetooth to work reliably in Linux by just recompiling the kernel and change your alsa config to use jack to remap your output to yada yada yada... No thanks.
Some cheaper devices are more difficult (I have a super cheap bluetooth receiver for an old car where you need to turn on the BT on the phone before turning on the dongle) but nothing along the lines of "unpair, repair, unpair, repair".
The behavior of Apple devices interacting with non-Apple devices is an intentional design choice by Apple to NOT support seamless interoperability. That's very different from the underlying tech being inferior to Apple's proprietary solutions.
Because those tech companies intentionally make it unnecessarily hard. Rather than creating an (open) standard they dig out an extra moat around their walled garden, and make it essentially impossible to release well-integrated products without paying the Apple/Google/Amazon Tax - if they even allow it at all.
Just compare it with a standard like Wifi or Displayport: it's orders of magnitude more complex than pushing some audio to a headphone, yet it works seamlessly across dozens of vendors. When was the last time you had to worry about your computer with a Windows Ethernet port not being compatible with a router providing Apple Ethernet?
Not that it hasn't been done before, but it's been a while. x_X
Until they don’t. Adding an Apple Watch to my iPhone means it no longer supports airdrop, and I can’t install apps to my iPhone via Xcode.
Reference? I admit I use Airdrop once every 5 years or so, but I've had a Watch for longer than that.
More, look at how non-integrated much of the big companies are. Sony used to amuse the heck out of me for how isolated all of their products were from each other. Microsoft, similarly, had some odd screwups in their own ecosystems. Often by trying to present it as if they had a set of APIs that would work on all of their offerings, but with hard to reason about restrictions based on what you were targeting. Amazon was similarly run as a series of different teams/companies that all happen to be under the same umbrella company name.
There is nothing preventing cross company integration but these companies themselves. That behavior should not be rewarded by customers or allowed by regulatory agencies.
Nest… is that still a thing?
Ring-Alexa integration is good but not great.
Amazon Music the app integration with Alexa is… non-existent? I can’t play music on my phone and move it to an echo device. I’m now resorting to posting on HN and hoping that a product dev or PM notices.
A healthy market would see casual interop between these services, and they all started with that interop before slowly strangling it out and monetising through adverts, tracking, data mining, and exclusivity. Open protocols allow you to bypass that though, which is why each of these networks are locked down.
There's no reason why your Airpods should talk over a proprietary Apple protocol and your web apps only work 100% effectively on chrome browsers, having inferior functionality by design if you don't commit fully to the landlord of your walled garden of choice.
