Ask HN: Walled garden dwellers: What keeps you there?

In reading the discussion about Tahoe's release and Apple's prioritization to meet its ship dates over its delivering actual new value to customers has got me thinking about what keeps me there.

I am thinking about this more in the angle of moving to a simpler device, not a switch to Android which feels to me like it's trending toward just a different walled garden.

After considering, my only main barriers for switching:

* Cloud Sync / Backup

Particularly for Photos, Messages and App Data, the data is auto-saved seamlessly. If I lose my phone, I can be back on a new one in a few hours.

* Calendar and List Management

As primitive as the experience still is with Siri relative to modern AI assistants, having my to-do and shopping list sync'd to my devices and being able to add to them with voice commands is an essential.

* Electronics Interface Apps

A few devices I have (solar charge controller, leak detector) require an iOS/Android app to use. There's not a great way around this, but keeping an old phone as a controller is an option.

It's really a much shorter list than I thought it would be. There are definitely some apps that I use whose experience would be decidedly worse if I had to use them in a browser (YouTube, Spotify, Maps) but it feels almost worth trying.

If there were an AI-focused simple phone that could solve the first two and offered a modern AI voice interface, I would be very interested to try it.

I am curious to hear other's opinions.