I've already covered Mobile Operating Systems some in the MacOS and Linux posts, but given the specialized nature of Mobile Operating Systems, I'll elaborate on them further in a new entry here. Because the Mobile Operating Sytem world is generally divided between iOS and Android, I will cover both of them in some detail here.
iOS was developed to run as a mobile version of MacOS with lower power requirements to be used with Apple's early iPhone models. In 2014 with the release of iOS 7, iOS became a truly distinct Operating System, though it still uses the XNU kernel, which was developed under NeXTSTEP and forms the basis of all of OS X's capabilities.
iOS offers a very simple and relatively restricted User Interface. This serves two main purposes. First, it makes it more difficult for users to create a situation where they are going to encounter many more errors or issues using their iOS devices. Second, it allows Apple to maintain a tighter control over what an iPhone looks like, thereby protecting their brand. You can think of it as a much less extreme version of Ferrari's brand protection strategies, which include legally preventing people from painting their Ferrari-branded vehicles in a manner inconsistent with Ferrari's requirements.
iMessage was developed as an iPhone-exclusive alternative to SMS, the prevailing messaging standard on all mobile devices until 2020. SMS was lightweight, but came with significant limitations. For instance, SMS had a strict limit on file sizes and types which could be sent, making it difficult to send large or detailed images over mobile devices. At the time SMS was developed, this was considered to be a negligible disadvantage, as nobody expected that large or detailed images or files would be stored, let alone sent, from mobile devices. SMS also does not have suppport for read receipts, sending or unsending messages, and several other kinds of metadata. Apple developed iMessage to add many of these capabilities to the iPhone, and perhaps infamously delineated these messages by making the chat bubbles blue when communicating with iMessage.
When the iPhone 4 came out, Apple wanted to introduce a standard for communications which included both audio and video, similar to Skype, for use with all of their devices. In the end, they created a system they called FaceTime, which came preinstalled on all new Apple devices, and would be relatively easy to maintain and improve compared to Skype. Notably, FaceTime was geared toward individual conversations rather than group discussions, like Skype and Teamspeak.
Apple Services
To round off their ecosystem, Apple offers a number of services designed to work particularly well with their products. However, these services are no longer exclusive to Apple products due to recent EU legislation These include iCloud Drive, which allows users to store files from their iOS and MacOS devices in the cloud, Apple Music, which is the successor to iTunes, Apple TV, which was intended to be a competitor to Netflix, but at this time has a very limited catalog, and a few others which are seldom used today. In all, these make up a minority of the major "ecosystem" features available on iOS and MacOS.
Andriod manufacturers also have their own ecosystems, but unlike Apple, there is no single unified ecosystem. Of the major android manufacturers, the ones which have made the most progress toward their ecosystems are Google and Samsung. As I am not particulalry familiar with Samsung's Ecosystem, I will be focusing on Google's.
Google Messages is meant to be a competitor to Apple's iMessage. Powered by RCS, it does not have all of the same capabilities as iMessage, however it has the significant advantage of being usable through a web browser. This means that Google Messages can be used by an android phone or by a Mac or PC. Google Messages has an extra challenge to face in that there was already a major competitor for it in the form of Signal, a sercurity-focused messaging platform which runs on Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, and Linux, and likely some smaller, less well-known Operating Systems.
As of 2024, Google has begun to integrate their Gemini Language Model into Android devices. Gemini has now replaced Google Assistant and Bixby as the predominant smart assistant in the Android ecosystem, and is aided by the capabilities of a large language model, or LLM. LLMs are a complicated topic, so I won't get into the details here, but in short, Gemini can handle complex commands or questions, and is capable of using the context of the phone screen, active settings, and many other variables in providing accurate and helpful feedback. It is worth noting that Apple has their own version, called Apple Intelligence, but that at the time of writing, Apple Intelligence is far less advanced in its capabilities, and has yet to be effectively integrated into Apple's Ecosystem. Furthermore, Apple Intelligence is desinged to run predominantly on-device, which prevents it from being used on older products. Whereas Gemini can run partially on device, but can also run in the cloud in order to bring similar functionality to older devices, even as old as the Pixel 3A, which is a budget model Pixel that came out in 2019.
As with Google Messages, Google Drive is a direct competitor to Apple's Cloud ecosystem, but shares the advantage of being easily usable and accessible from the browser on any computer. Furthermore, Google Drive can also be used as an easy backup solution for Windows or Mac devices, and as such allows users to access files from their computers far more easily. Google Drive is also implemented well into Google's Enterprise products, which means that it gets frequent major quality of life improvements. Furthermore, this encourages the use of Google's Office Suite, which includes Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Sites, which is the platform hosting this blog! To provide some context, everything to do with this blog is hosted in Google Drive using the Google Sites service. While I do pay for Google Storage, I don't actually need to. Everything I've set up related to this blog specifically (aside from the domain name) was doable for free through this part of the Google Ecosystem.
Google constantly introduces new projects, and while the majority of these are canceled, some of them stay around and become important to their users. Additionally, Google has its own entertainment services, primarily built around YouTube. YouTube Premium is a paid service which allows you to skip ads as well as access pre-released features on the YouTube app and website. It also gives you access to YouTube Music Premium as a bundled item, though YouTube Music Premium is also purchaseable on its own for a lower cost. YouTube Music is a more open alternative to Apple Music or Spotify, but for some time was considerably less developed than either of its main competitors. Recently, the app has become more influential, but is considerably worse on a free plan when compared to Spotify.
While it can be tempting to try to compare the Apple and Google ecosystems to decide which is "better", in recent years the question has become more of preference and use cases. If you want to use an ecosystem which prioritizes communication and entertainment, Apple is probably the way to go. If your focus is on being able to use as much of your ecosystem as possible no matter where you are, or if you need to be able to access lots of files from different kinds of computers, it's pobably simpler to just use the Google Ecosystem. Additionally, you can combine elements of these ecosystems in order to even better serve your needs. If you already have Apple devices, you can use many of the components of the Google Ecosystem independently, which is what I do. I use a Mac, iPhone, and Windows computer, and I use Google Drive to bring all of my files together. It should be noted that I use my phone more like a Cloud terminal, and store very little on the local storage.