There’s a mobile ecosystem battle raging, with Apple and Google racing to build end-to-end mobile monopolies. According to VisionMobile, “The triumph of iOS and Android is a testament to the superiority of ecosystems economics over legacy business models.” Sadly, this triumph has a casualty, and that casualty is you.

It all worked great when Apple was a hardware company that dabbled in software, and when Google focused on cloud services but didn’t veer into hardware. Now that these companies are encroaching on each others’ turf, some essential things are getting lost in translation.