What would be the “great cost” of moving from an iPhone to an Android phone? I’m struggling to think of what would cost money at all, aside from the phone itself.
A year ago someone on HN said “I can confirm that iMessage is extremely common in Australia. WhatsApp is very uncommon, outside of people with European (and maybe South American?) friends or family to keep in touch with.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365562
My guess is you’re both expressing truths of your individual social circles but making unjustified extrapolations to an entire nation.
The issue with iMessage outside the US is the branding, it's branded as an SMS app and SMS being dead (outside of ads and delivery drivers) doesn't help for adoption.
This has more to do with the way the iPhone was launched, and the American desire to own the most expensive product, than any technical merits.
If you have an iCloud subscription, you can do this directly with a browser, just click upload and wait for it to happen. There's also a Windows client for iCloud, but I've never tried it.
Google photos is definitely easier to export and backup to my windows PC although Apple does provide a half decent iCloud client now for windows. It's a bit janky and took awhile for me to get a proper pipeline (you can accidently delete your cloud copy by doing the wrong thing).
One thing I really miss about Android was the ability to just plug in via USB-C to any computer and backup all the photos (and then remove them from the local phone). Google Photos would retain its full quality copy this way and I would free up phone space and have a full quality copy on my local machine (plus local external drive). Try this on an iPhone and it's slow as hell (even though it has USB-C), often fails partway through a large copy, and when you delete the photos locally I believe iCloud deletes their copy as well (even if you have plenty of cloud storage). I understand it's a "sync" tool technically but there's really no reason for it to be restricted in this way.
It's not just about migrating the phone, if you own an Apple Watch, AirPods, one of their laptops, their online services, etc. all that stuff works best within the Apple ecosystem. If you move they don't work as well (if at all) and you may need to replace them. If you are deeply bought in to Apple products, it really isn't that easy to move.