Ironically, somewhere around 2014, Google was doing the exact same style "keep Android open" campaign, recruiting developers around the world - including me, to help lobby for keeping Android "open" and tell the horror stories of issues that random OEMs caused by forking Android, breaking compatibility and security.
Made sense to me at the time and they were really into "Android should be open source" vibe, so I supported it.
10 years later, I'm also rugpulled. Their vision has dramatically shifted into trying to build a walled garden on top of Android, but now they are haunted by their open source roots, and the walled garden is just a really tall pile of bricks laid around it.
So many times we've been promised things, only for them to be delivered in a half-baked state with half of the parts open source while other parts were closed only to Google and Google approved apps.
So many times the issue trackers for different parts of the platform ecosystem have changed, that some issues are impossible to debug without using web archive. And just as many times, they have been closed, ignored for years or unnoticed, being ping-ponged among team members until they forget about it.
Yet, even with all of the closed and privatized parts of the ecosystem, they are still not able to deliver on an ecosystem promise.
They control my email, my photos, my cloud, my browser, my phone - yet cannot keep a single thing properly in sync. Still, I download something and I do not know where it went. Still, I cannot Airdrop things without a 3rd party service. Still, I take a photo only for it to appear on the cloud 5 minutes later. Still, I cannot have a "sandbox" account for testing that just works, but have to juggle multiple accounts, causing their auth system to break 80% of the time when testing.
As a developer, I do not plan to support Android anymore. I recently got an iPhone, and am now fully switching to it. Even tho I am long on $GOOG stock, because the money printer go brrr, I will be spending that money in the Apple's ecosystem from now on.
Apple pisses off many HN users who then swear to switch to Android, Google pisses off many HN users who then swear to switch to an iPhone – so for both companies, in effect, nothing changes.
Aside from that, the masses don't care or know about any of this. A couple of HN users don't make a dent in the revenue of any large company. What we can do is work on alternative ecosystems or at least support the small companies and organizations who do with our wallets.
People who switch are a vocal minority too.
It doesn't make sense to choose between a snake that bit you and another that bit you earlier.
If you don't want to be bitten, get out of the snake pit.
> 10 years later, I'm also rugpulled. Their vision has dramatically shifted into trying to build a walled garden on top of Android
Abrupt abandoning of their Nexus line for overpriced Pixel hardware was the watershed moment. The exact moment when their executives decided to ride free on open source labor.
> Still, I cannot Airdrop things without a 3rd party service
Well, it hardly works between Apple devices themselves to begin with (sending a bunch of pictures over to a 4 years old iphone works like 1 times out of 10 trial..). At least I can use regular old Bluetooth to send stuff to any kind of device from Android without the cruel gatekeeping of only Apple devices.
So yeah, both platforms have their own ways they suck in.
Out of curiosity, have you seen Genode before?
https://genode.org
One of the things it works on is the PinePhone, so there's _some_ hope of at least one viable alternative happening:
https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3...