Study Together Vendor Lock-in
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What is vendor lock in? How can you recognize the anti-pattern? Vendor lock-in is when the software you have created prevents your customers from being able to use other products and vendors without substantial cost to them.
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What is an example? Creating an application on AndroidStudio eventhough it will not be able to be used by Apple users.
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Why is it harmful? It naturally shrinks the pool of customers you can attract to purchase your product as some will shy away from a prouduct that prevents them from being able to use other proucts as easily/cheaply.
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How do we fix it? We refractor [Quora example: https://www.quora.com/What-is-meant-by-code-refactoring-Explain-with-example] code and attempt to do it in such a way that the system is not confined to one system or another.
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How to recognize Vendor Lock-in. -- Vendor Lock-In refers to a lack of interoperability for your customers with other tools and software they are using. This inhibits the growth of users who will choose a software typically by what works with their existing tools.
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An Example of Vendor Lock-in. -- A good example of vendor lock-in would be an example of book kepping software. Our product will suffer from vendor lock-in if it supports importing data from spreadsheets but not syncing data with an ecommerce site like shopify. Customers would be forced to find a way to get their daya out of their website, into a spreadsheet and then into our book keeping product.
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Why is Vendor Lock-in harmful to software design -- Vendor lock-in is harmful to software design because limits options of working with data and creates a lack of modularity / speration of concerns in our code.
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How to fix it- use integrated software to give users freedom to choose alternatives that better fit the needs of the user. This can be regards to OS compatibility or hardware limitations. (found from makeuseof)