A rough search on Wikipedia tells us that an ecosystem is a community of living organisms in conjunction with non-living organisms that interact as a holistic system.

Product and digital ecosystems are similar beings that provide a greater value to the user when they interact with one another as they are individually programmed for different purposes but collectively work as a whole.

Examples of Digital Ecosystems

Apple

Apple wouldn’t be the trillion-dollar company they are today without the carefully built family of products they host on their platform. They analyse the user needs in different aspects of their lives and build a product to satisfy a particular need. This is the story of every digital or physical product out there; But what apple does differently is the interaction between these products. Very few companies have built products that talk to one another fluidly and enhance the functionality of the other as they age.

Let us consider the infamous iPhone which serves as the gateway to the gardens of Apple Ecosystem for the majority of the consumers out there. iPhone is a stand-alone system capable of providing you with a superior user experience without any hiccups. But when you start to get on the market for smartwatches, you quickly find that its a no brainer for you to get the apple watch instead of any other watches out there simply because these devices talk to each other and provide you with real-time, beautifully designed analytics that just works!

There are little hiccups and for most consumers, they just want to open the box and set it up in five minutes and start using it.

This is exactly what the apple ecosystem accomplishes. Seamless integration between devices that makes the user think its all magic.

Imagine the setup process for every product you ever bought from Apple. Did it seem like magic back then? It probably was. Showcasing this kind of device-family approach in the settings menu that is linked by one iCloud account, the user’s perception of security and endowment to the products increases. You are not just having another product but a family of products that talk to one another that you use in your daily life which you cherish and hold dear. It appeals to your deeper emotions even if the functionality is subpar at times.

Some examples are:

1. You hand off that application you were browsing on your phone and its open on your mac now
2. Replying to your emails that you started on your mac but completed on your apple watch (sigh)
3. Replying to iMessage with your voice on your HomePod

The Google “Ecosystem”

Google unlike Apple, does not have a closed system of software services but that is how they are so good at what they do. Google is based on ads. Ads are the bread and butter of Google products. Imagine, how can someone, who just plays football with you on weekends get you the perfect birthday gift? No. They need to be most of the day, living with you, in a relationship with you, be with you through your hardest times and sometimes be married to you. Even then they can mess up your birthday present. You see where I am getting at.

Google needs to know different aspects of your life first to promote relevant ads that interest you. If it just knows that you like black coffee, their ads would be useless. It needs to know the weather that makes you want coffee, the time, the location, your mindset, your schedule and how much sleep you got last night to accurately predict what type of coffee and where you should get it. You and I both had moments when we search something on YouTube or Google Search and be just awestruck as to how accurately the prediction algorithm works. The more you interact with Google, the easier your life becomes.

Google makes products that act like individual nodes that are connected by invisible lines. The above example is only possible when you use Google Maps, Fitbit health tracking, Google calendar, Search and maybe Google Drive. No platform is standalone and these products talk to one another and have a virtual profile of the person who uses these services as a whole.

By doing this, the prediction model for google products just mesmerises the users. People report that Google knows more about them than they do about themselves. If you are doubtful of this, go through your YouTube recommendations to watch next and note the ads that pop up and compare it to the wish list you have on your mind.

Addition of products to the family has to enhance user experience or the magic won’t work

Your HomePod turning on the lights and setting a scene when you enter your home that uses your apple watch’s GPS that in-turn automatically tells your phone to text your wife to buy some milk on her way back home to which you get the reply with an emoji on your mac as you work. Likewise, adding a task to Google task with a time block can automatically be sent to the Google Calendar which can help you set up a meeting on Google Meet directly. When products like these talk to one another and save you a few extra efforts and clicks when you revisit them, it solidifies the trust and credibility that you have on those particular platforms. You live through an illusion that you are getting more productive with less effort. Maybe you are?

Pricing Strategies

Users are prepared to pay the premium if it means they get a seamless user experience. Companies like Adobe, Apple know this well and they capitalise on the fundamental basis that if they make their products well connected, proprietary and locked in (without actually saying it out loud) while making it easy to move data between them alone, they can charge a premium. You are now starting to get locked in and starting to sacrifice your freedom of choice. Why? Because you came inside to have a sneak peek.

Walled Gardens of Tech

Everything within the walls of these proprietary systems is well defined, coherent and luxurious. Apple, Adobe, Google try to mask the different flaws that are present in their ecosystems. Google collects your data by asking you for one particular aspect of each product. Your photos on Google Photos, your videos on YouTube, your interests on search, your schedule on your calendar and finally your location on google maps. Voila, your virtual self is born.

Apple makes it cumbersome for you to purchase products or digital apps from smaller businesses because they effectively conduct the game while being participants in it. For reference, Apple has competitor services like Apple TV, Apple Music that are available on the App Store, that charges a tax when other platforms make a sale. This has made services like Netflix and Spotify to pursue alternate user flows where they make you sign up on the browser and not on the iOS application themselves to avoid the percentage cut. You as a user, are now starting to dig through the evil soil beneath the garden.

Adobe is notorious for their use of proprietary files; that work well when they are used within their platforms but are a headache when you try to import them into other services like Figma, Sketch or Affinity platforms. Adobe also has this flow where they casually mention that saving your files on the cloud is the best way to keep your files safe and force you to do so. It might be so, but that makes it harder for you as a consumer to leave the platform when you got 50 GB worth of files on their cloud in the future. The interesting thing here is, Figma and Sketch files can be opened on the competitor platform Adobe XD but XD files are proprietary.

Conclusion

It is evident that ecosystems are the trend for now since they provide a seamless user experience and everything just seems to work perfectly. But, in the forthcoming years, we, as designers and consumers of these products need to ask ourselves how much of our data, time and money should we be investing in one platform. Are we sacrificing our freedom of choice to use a wide range of products that might even be better in the future but are unable to do so because we had been having long toxic relationships with existing ones? The more data you provide these platforms with, the harder it is for you to leave them.