But none of them work like iCloud. No one but Apple is allowed to make an app that reliably ships your photos to the cloud.

The original comment was about exporting photos, and how "Apple makes it difficult". Which they do not.

Syncing is a different story, let's see how this holds up:

If you want to sync your iPhone's photos to Dropbox, you give Dropbox permission to access the Photos library and it syncs. https://www.multcloud.com/tutorials/sync-iphone-photos-to-dr...

The company hosting that URL offers a product for syncing between various clouds, I haven't used it but it does exist. https://www.multcloud.com/download

So I guess this is another one of those things that just isn't true. Go figure.

Exporting in real time is the expectation, anything else is subpar.

Not really. For Dropbox, Nextcloud, Photo Sync, et c to upload your photos, the app needs to remain open; it can't upload in the background for more than a minute or so.

This means that only iCloud can do real background syncing. If you want to upload a full camera roll to a non-iCloud service, you're in for a world of frustration. You'll have to disable screenlock and put the phone on a power cord and leave it open with the app up for hours and hours. Of course iCloud doesn't have such limitations.

No non-Apple app is allowed to do background sync, no matter what you install. They have put iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos in a privileged position.

It is as much about perception and convenience as anything else. When I talk about smartphones with non-technical people, the top complaint (against both Apple and Google) is that they try to trap customers by making it hard to move your stuff from iOS to Android or vice versa. They're running into issues for different reasons (forgotten passwords, data migration tool not getting everything) but it's fundamentally the same complaint: why does this require some specific procedure instead of just working the way I expect it to work? This may just be the grumpy nerd in me talking, but all of this would be a lot easier if mobile apps dealing with interchangeable things like photos and text saved user data to files instead of inscrutable databases by default.

True. It's one thing to say "I can't do a thing", and another to say "thing can't be done".