Ask Paul: December 13 (Premium)

It’s Friday the 13th, and after a particularly arduous trip to New York, I’m ready for the weekend to start. Let’s kick it off with …
Tech polygamy
Simard57 asks:

What strategy do you use to exist in three ecosystems - Microsoft, Apple & Google - and unify your experience (passwords, files, photos, …)?

This is a lot easier than it used to be, but the general rule I follow is to not use any “one-way, dead-end streets,” those products and services that are tied to a particular platform, whenever possible. Historically, many (but not all) of Apple’s apps and services were like that, designed to lock users into their ecosystem, though that’s finally changing in some cases (the Apple TV app, for example, is pretty much everywhere, Apple Music is on Android, and so on).

There are lots of examples of this kind of thing. I’d never use Apple Podcasts because I want the freedom to move between iOS and Android; I prefer apps/services that work everywhere. (Granted, podcast apps aren’t particularly “sticky” in that it’s easy to move from app to app at any time, but you get the idea.) Same with music apps, video apps, news/reading apps, etc.

In some cases, of course, you simply have to choose whatever is best, even if there is some lock-in, and the goal here is to pick a solution from a company that is serious about that thing and will never leave that market. Kindle e-books probably fall into this category, though their app is pretty much everywhere it needs to be (with some serious limitations on iOS).

For passwords, I recommend a password manager of some kind. I actually use Chrome/the new Edge for this at the moment, and you could argue that it doesn’t meet my pervasiveness rule since the passwords do sync to Android apps, which is awesome, but not to iOS apps. (I get around this by syncing my Chrome settings to Safari, and that gets them into the iOS ecosystem.) A third-party password manager like LastPass or 1Password (or whatever) is probably the better choice.

I use OneDrive pretty exclusively for work and personal documents because it works best with Windows, which I use, and because I use Office 365, which gives me a lot of storage. (OneDrive is also on Mac and mobile, of course.) I back up phone photos, and store my entire photos collection, to both Google Photos and OneDrive. Google is actually better for this than Microsoft, in my opinion, but they both work well and are both available everywhere. (If you’re a Prime member, you should look at Amazon photos too.) You should always put your photos in multiple services for redundancy reasons.

For the most part, I find it very easy to move between Android and iOS on mobile, and I’d probably likewise have a reasonably good experience moving between Windows and Mac on desktop if I cared about using the Mac. Chrome OS and Linux aren’t there yet for me because of missing apps and some workflow issues (no local OneDrive sync, which I co...