I found switching off Google to be as hard as I imagine switching off Apple will be.

But how did they get people into the ecosystem to begin with? iOS has ALWAYS been this locked down. Heck it didn't even have an app store to begin with. The apps you got were what Apple decided you could have and that was it. Cell phones before the iPhone (Palm, Blackberry and even dumb phones) had some form of software market capabilities, and certainly phones after and their larger competitor (Windows Mobile, Palm again and Android respectively) have had far more open platforms. So how did Apple manage to get all the developers and users locked in when the better options were – perhaps with the brief exception of June 2007 - Sept 2008 (if you don't count Palm and Blackberry) – always there?

Additionally, how has Apple designed their ecosystem to make it "as painful as possible" to switch to a competitor? It's on the app developers whether they would charge for a replacement copy of their app on Android. Apple does nothing to prevent them from offering a "switcher" discount. All of your first party app data is syncable to your computer, and Google even offers a tool that says it can do contacts, photos, calendars, messages, apps and music. And if that's not enough, Apple will provide you with a copy of all your iCloud stored account data in the original format (for things like photos) and in standard format (for things like calendars and emails) https://support.apple.com/en-us/102208. So other than Apple themselves providing a first party tool to migrate your data directly to your new Android phone, what are they doing or not doing that qualifies as "[making] it as painful as can be to switch"