Vendor Lock-In

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
But I use an Accu-Chek meter!

Imagine yourself buying a printer or some other device such as a digital camera. You need a battery or replacement ink cartridge, as it ran out or has worn out. You make your merry way to the store, buy a cheap third party replacement, heads home, ready to start using the device again. You replace whatever you need, and...

It doesn't fit. Or it does fit, but the device tells you it's incompatible.

Turns out that item or accessory is bespoke to the device, and no one else but the original manufacturer is producing it, potentially putting you at the mercy of the manufacturer as even if there are third-party replacements, they are either of dubious quality or the original manufacturer has taken steps to crack down on those making aftermarket versions of their accessories.

This is what is termed as vendor lock-in, where manufacturers make their consumers dependent on their services and theirs alone. Attempting to switch to another platform would come at significant expense and a whole lot of re-training for those affected. While this is more or less understandable from a business standpoint, the likes of Microsoft and Apple have pretty much gained notoriety for such practices, leading to antitrust lawsuits against said companies. Not to mention it can get egregious if barriers to entry and resulting frustration from the users caught up in such a lock in outweigh whatever benefits it may bring to the manufacturer (e.g. unnecessary deaths resulting from not being able to check one's glucose levels due to proprietary - and expensive - test strips), especially in developing countries.

Unlike PCs, consoles from one manufacturer are almost always compatible only with games and/or software made for that manufacturer's console - not that emulation can't fix it, though. Bleem successfully legitimized such workarounds in a Pyrrhic Victory against Sony upon being sued for unauthorised emulation of the PlayStation, though such projects are still frowned upon by companies such as Nintendo, who demonise emulation as a way to facilitate piracy regardless of how emulator developers try to distance themselves from copyright infringement.

In addition, multiplayer games frequently isolate players on different platforms, i.e. Call of Duty players on Xbox One are typically unable to play against those on PC or PlayStation 4. Cross-platform play, or at the very least, leaderboards, do exist from time to time, but is uncommon due to conflicts of interest on part of Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft among others, or technical difficulties arising from making differing architectures talk to one another.

Examples of Vendor Lock-In include:

Film

  • When Netflix became popular in the late 2010s to the early 2020s, it became the go-to venue for people to stream movies from, but other media companies and film studios saw the golden goose and decided to start their own streaming services, more often than not taking their catalogue off Netflix and streaming them exclusively on their own respective services. This naturally did not sit well with those who had to pay $10 for Disney+ just for their kids to watch their favourite Disney Princesses, another $10 for Paramount+ for The Godfather, and so on.

Video Games

  • For a time, games for the Atari 2600 and its contemporaries were produced solely by the console manufacturers themselves, which made gamers even more confined to their consoles' ecosystems than it is these days. Eventually, a number of Atari programmers got fed up with not being given credit to their works, leading to the formation of Activision, and by extension, third-party video game developers.
  • Also averted with the Dina clone console, which is compatible with both Sega SG-1000 and Colecovision games no thanks to both consoles sharing the same underpinnings, though compatibility with the latter is spotty at best due to how the Coleco controller is implemented. In a similar vein, later clone consoles such as the RetroN series come with multiple cartridge slots for games from different console manufacturers.
  • Averted with the Atari joystick port, first seen in the Atari 2600 in 1977, and was later adopted as a de facto standard used by rival companies. The Commodore VIC-20 had one Control Port, and the Commodore 64 had two, both of which work with Atari joysticks. The port is also compatible with Sega Master System and later Sega Genesis controllers as well, and not only that, game controllers are mutually compatible between the three systems though since the 2600 joystick only had one action button, it would only work best on Master System or Genesis games that didn't make full use of the controller.
  • The Universal Windows Platform has been branded as this by critics, most notably Tim Sweeney of Unreal fame. The idea of a centralised app store is good, as it mitigates fragmentation and allows for a one-stop shop for everything a user needs, but the new Platform is viewed as unnecessarily limiting and further puts Windows users at Microsoft's mercy, the latter being no stranger to monopoly lawsuits thrown against them in the past. Fortunately, the UWP hasn't panned out much (no thanks to some who hold off on Windows 10 due to privacy concerns amongst other things, and as UWP games require the latest Windows 10 updates, this presents a barrier to entry) and most AAA games are still running off the more open Win32 API.
  • Attempted by Nintendo and Sega by requiring software match an image on the firmware ROM to boot (which also serves to protect against data corruption and poorly inserted cartridges). Said images contain their respective trademarks, opening up unlicensed third-party software creators to potential lawsuits for improper use of them until this scheme was struck down by the US legal system in Sega v. Accolade. The hardware components that had to be reverse engineered to bypass still worked, but it was entirely legal (just difficult) to make a bypass for them.
    • Nintendo did a low-tech variation of this with the "NINTENDO" trademark moulded on every Famicom Disk System floppy (which was based on Mitsumi's Quick Disk format). The Nintendo wordmark was indented in such a way that disks lacking the name would not boot, or so Nintendo thought. As with the example above, they were banking on bootleggers using the wordmark as is, thereby making them liable for trademark infringement. However, said bootleggers got around with this by either mincing the "NINTENDO" name into variations such as "NINFENDO", "NINJENDO", "INTEND" or something along those lines, or just moulding the pits enough to satisfy the floppy mechanism and boot into the game.
  • Until June 2022, games purchased on Epic Games Store that used EGS's launcher for multiplayer settings (such as displaying the username of an opposing player without an additional account registry) were totally incompatible with non-EGS versions of the same game in multiplayer, and even after that date compatibility required developers patch in such compatibility. This became infamous when Epic purchased Rocket League and migrated it to their own system forcing every single player to migrate their data to a new account. If this limit was due to malice or incompetence (EGS is infamous for taking three years to implement a shopping cart feature and complaining when users made multiple purchases in a short amount of time) is unclear.

Real Life

  • Apple is pretty much notorious for this on their iOS devices, as users are expected to get all their software needs off the App Store. Sideloading was made possible since 2017, but unlike Google, users have to jump through hoops in order to install an IPA file, and even then, developer certificates only last for a week before re-signing. There are however alternative app stores which abuse enterprise certificates, mostly using those titled under companies based off China (Said certificates were made for the purpose of internal applications used for businesses and organisations.) and offer either tweaked versions of popular apps or pirated software such as freemium games with the paywalled stuff already unlocked. In 2024 Apple formally introduced sideloading in iOS 17.4, but only in the EU, and even then it also comes with restrictions and limitations, in typical Apple corporate fashion.
    • Their use of the proprietary dock connector and later the Lightning port was also a sticking point as most if not all other devices simply used commodity micro USB or USB-C plugs instead, and aftermarket, Apple-certified Lightning cables are significantly more expensive due to licensing costs; you may opt for a cheaper imitation Lightning cord but reliability isn't obviously guaranteed. Apple did eventually incorporate a USB-C port on their iPad Pro line, but mainline iPhones still used Lightning. It took EU legislation mandating the USB-C standard on all devices sold in the region for Apple to finally stop this practice.
    • Individual internal components of Apple products are digitally serialized and will, for no apparent actual reason, shut down utterly random features of the phone (things like auto-brightness or double digit refresh rates for cameras, shutting down any possible claims of security risks) if they're replaced by anyone other than Apple, even if cannibalized from another product of the exact same model, only to suddenly and immediately work again if the original components are swapped back in, or if the components in question are reprogrammed using third-party devices (though swapping batteries for later iPhone models may now involve taking the circuit board from the original battery and soldering it to the new one, which obviously isn't without its risks as lithium-ion batteries are notoriously volatile). The only possible motivation anyone could find was to ensure anyone who bought an Apple phone (etc.) would be forced to pay Apple again when their product broke. In late 2021 shareholder complaints and growing legislative movements about the sheer amount of perfectly functional electronics this doomed to the scrapheap (as one broken component=entirely broken phone) got Apple to pledge to stop, but only relatively mild improvements (if not improvements in name only) were seen the following year, and even those are attributed to making it easier for Indian manufacturing than actual effort to avoid this problem. In comparison, Google does serialise certain components on later Pixel phones such as the Pixel 6's touch screen and fingerprint reader, but unlike Apple whose configuration/pairing utilities are only available to themselves and themselves alone, Google does allow end-users to reprogram said components to work on their devices.
  • With the increasing prevalence of computer systems in automobiles, this has become a point of contention for car owners looking for servicing their rides on their own. Diagnostic tools are out of reach for most people, leading to piracy for third parties and owners to be able to perform repairs in their computer-controlled vehicles.
  • The practise of carrier locking cellular phones to a particular provider has been around for quite some time, restricting phones bought off a carrier to SIM cards locked to just that network (and occasionally their affiliates, e.g. MVNOs re-selling cellular services using a major carrier's infrastructure), and with the popularity of GSM phones which utilise removable SIM cards, SIM locks are viewed negatively by those who find the ability to easily switch handsets on a GSM phone convenient. This form of carrier lock-in has since been outlawed in Canada, Chile, China, Israel, and Singapore, and in countries where SIM locking is still being implemented by providers, they are now required by law to offer unlocking services, and exceptions have been made to the DMCA to allow third-party hacking and/or unlocking.
  • As mentioned earlier, test strips for diabetes glucose meters are typically made for a specific make or model, making an Accu-Chek strip incompatible with a OneTouch meter. This has led to a rather sad and harrowing situation when a poor Haitian boy died as he was unable to check his glucose level in time due to how scarce and expensive test strips are in developing or impoverished regions.
  • Google products:
    • The Google account integration of the Google Chrome web browser means it is difficult to switch to another browser, as doing so means losing the ability to sync between multiple devices. Downplayed and alleviated, as most browsers allow the importing of bookmarks and history from Chrome. However, the trope is still present, as these other browsers do not integrate themselves with a Google account. While on Google services, the company loves to nag you to switch to Chrome, bringing you into the ecosystem. This also applies to the underlying Chromium code base (Blink) used by, well, Chrome. Due to Chrome's popularity, a number of sites are built with Chromium-derived browsers in mind, leading to some compatibility issues with other browsers such as Firefox (which uses Gecko).
    • Downplayed with Android and the Google Play Store. No one's keeping users from sideloading apps and games off outside sources (assuming they know that installing random APKs is caveat emptor), yet by and large Google's control over the platform makes users largely dependent on Play Services. Want to install Asphalt on a non-Google certified tablet? You'll have to sideload Google Play Games as well.
      • This became even more of an issue with Huawei when the US government under Donald Trump imposed trade sanctions on the company, barring them from using Google services other than the base Android Open Source Project components (they distanced themselves even further from Android with their own Unix-like operating system called HarmonyOS, though some have alleged that it was merely forked off Android with the Serial Numbers Filed Off). Huawei has their own app store called AppGallery, but not every software vendor is on board as US companies are (to a large extent) prohibited by law from conducting business with companies under the Entity List, hence why several popular apps are missing from their catalogue; Huawei does offer workarounds to allow for otherwise-unavailable apps to be downloaded to one's device, but compatibility may be hit or miss.
      • Samsung phones come with a second app store, the Samsung Galaxy Store, in addition to Google Play but everything otherwise applies. Samsung enjoys the unique privilege of being able to do this without Google taking a cut of purchases (as it does for every other app from Google Play Store or pre-installed) in return for having been an early backer of Android. Being locked into one's "choice" of two stores, one of which is poorly supported and largely duplicative of the other is, of course, hardly an improvement. Just to make it worse, the Galaxy Store starts automatically when the phone boots up and tries to run constantly in the background, consuming power and resources even if you never use it. You need to do a "Force Stop" on it from the apps setting menu in order to make it go away, and even then it sometimes spontaneously restarts itself.
    • Google's online services, such as Google docs, slides, and sheets. The files for your work are stored on their servers, in their own format. Exporting your work is easy, however, as you can download it in whatever format you want. What is not easy is trying to manually download every single document you've made over years of work, and migrate them towards a different office utility. Then, you'll have to sort out collaboration and access, if you document is shared with another person.
  • Juicero was a startup that made a cold press juicing machine that used proprietary juice bags. When journalists highlighted that the $699-$399 machine was redundant for most people, who can simply squeeze the bags to create the same effect, the company quickly suffered.
  • Keurig's K-Cup system relied on proprietary coffee cartridges made or licenced by Keurig, locking out other brands. But since the protection relied on a ring printed on the foil cap, simply cutting that part out and mounting it over a non-Keurig K-Cup is all that takes to defeat it.
  • Nvidia is notorious for making advanced features such as Deep Learning Super Sampling and CUDA exclusive to their GPUs, much to the derision of those with AMD or Intel GPUs. And even if you're on an Nvidia graphics card, certain new features such as frame generation are exclusive to 40 Series models, forcing you to upgrade in order to avail them. AMD responded with their own equivalent technologies under the GPUOpen banner which not only are vendor-agnostic but are also released under an open-source licence, allowing enterprising modders to integrate them into any game such as NarutoUA's FSR mod for Grand Theft Auto V. AMD positioned this as a way to alleviate concerns brought about by the recent chip shortages in the early 2020s which made high end computer parts even less accessible.
  • More or less a Justified Trope with printer ink cartridges, as while aftermarket inks are indeed cheaper, there's no guarantee as to whether they would perform as well or if it would damage the printer due to inferior formulation. This has however been the subject of a lawsuit between printer manufacturer Lexmark and Static Control Components, a company who makes chips used in third-party ink cartridges.
  • Sony:
    • The company took this trope to a draconian level with DRM on their camera batteries, where the camera would turn on but stall at the "For use with compatible battery only" error screen if a third-party battery pack is detected. Not that one would want to use a shoddy eBay-purchased battery though, but still...
    • Then again, Sony was and is still known for using bespoke formats and technologies anyway, such as the proprietary Memory Stick format they used exclusively on their devices for a time (which also saw use on a number of products by licensees) until conceding by releasing phones and cameras with commodity SD cards. Same goes for the PlayStation Vita, whose removable storage is in the form of memory cards designed specifically for the handheld. The memory card format backfired on them though, as the game cartridge format is a modified eMMC variant which hackers later exploited by developing passive adapters allowing people to use cheaper MicroSD cards on their jailbroken Vitas.
    • Ditto with the Betamax which was involved in the infamous videotape format war of the 80s. During its first five years of existence, Sony tried to make its Betamax a closed system, with only Sony making tape players and tapes; they only began licensing other manufacturers like Toshiba and Sanyo to make Betamax players in the early 1980s, and by then, however, it was already too late (by that point, VHS had a 60% market share). VHS (which JVC had designed from the start to be allowed to be made by any interested manufacturers, and had made sure that a tape from any manufacturer would play in a player made by any other manufacturer) would come to dominate the market until the rise of DVD.
  • Adobe:
    • Photoshop uses the proprietary .PSD format. Other image editing programs do implement basic support for it. However implementations may be lacking in functionality, or some software may not support features from the format. This means that collaborating with another person using Photoshop is difficult if you yourself don't pay for a subscription, leading to compatibility issues. A similar concept applies with Adobe's other software, like After Effects or Premiere Pro.
    • Once an artist gets into the Creative Cloud ecosystem, getting out is made even harder by how well Adobe's software integrates with each other. A .PSD file can be directly used in other software, like as a layer in Adobe Illustrator or as a static image in Premiere Pro. This means that other professionals are further incentivized to stay in the ecosystem, due to its convenience, and the fact that migrating a deeply-nested mess of Adobe formats to other software is tedious.
  • Some motorcycle tyres such as the 230/60-R15 Roadrunner and later Cobra Chrome tyres by Avon Tyres were made in such a size that other aftermarket companies literally had to manufacture parts like frames and wheels with said tyre size in mind. The obvious catch being if the tyre wears out or if you're in a certain country where parts like this aren't readily available, you'd have next to no other choice.
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