Huawei maintains their Android fork that runs without the Play store.
Google will not be able to close Android/AOSP without triggering a well-funded fork.
Whatever investment they had made in them literally evaporated in a week as mariadb and galera showed up. OpenIndiana basically made continued solaris development at Oracle a moot point, not that it wasnt already with Linux on the scene.
RedHat has tried something similar with CentOS, Encumbering it to try and drive sales, which backfired just as predictably. Rocky is a treat to run.
Rolling up Android into a proprietary walled garden would be a disaster. This isnt apple. What you could expect is a massive developer exodus from the open community to other friendlier projects. If your interest is western security/hegemony in technology then it would be a shame to see all that intellectual capital suddenly captured by a FOSS project from a marxist leninist country thats all too happy to give it away for free (DeepSeek anyone?)
In the past 2 years I've encountered a total of 3 apps that wouldn't run without Google.
In my country one bank had a 2fa app. Then they backtracked on security, but kept policy: they included the 2fa in the regular bank app. Now you don't have to use 2fa if you are using the bank app, because the bank app generates its own authorization, in the same device (app) without user interaction!
Fake admiration off. We also don't have to use any 2fa when we access banking through the website. (works on FF on Android)
Sure, the Pixel 8a camera is not bad for the price but it's still noticeably worse. The kind of difference you notice when someone with an iPhone shares photos with you.
Apps and the whole phone experience are a sh*tshow on both sides and I hate both with a passion. I'm still waiting for a decent linux experience on a phone - possibly with stupid banking apps support.
You act as if anyone to a first approximation cares about indie developers. Most of the popular apps on Android and iOS are from the big corporations and pay to win games. They could care less about ideology.
Samsung would rather not - they threated this card once before, while negotiating for Google to get rid of Motorola, and their bluff got called. Samsung tried to prop up Tizen as an Android alternative. Samsung since closed a number of its US OS offices - why sacrifice profits when they have a cozy arrangement: Samsung & other Android partners will continue to get the Android previews before anyone else: open source or not.
Nope. And accessing the website/online banking portal is not allowed without going through the smartphone app 2fa too.
Then they decided that Fuchsia was going to be the way forward - https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/android/117587/google-allege...
Now the latest is that they're once again merging Android & Chrome - https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-becoming-android-...
But Fuchsia is still being actively developed, not sure to what end - https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wi...
WhatsApp has an estimated active userbase of approximately 3 billion. [2] The number of iMessage users is estimated to be about 1 billion. [3]
[1] https://explodingtopics.com/blog/iphone-android-users#iphone...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/whatsapp-global-...
[3] https://usesignhouse.com/blog/imessage-stats/#:~:text=iMessa...
Seriously, if you haven't upgraded your desktop PC to a higher refresh rate screen yet: It's the biggest "feels like a new computer!" upgrade since we swapped HDDs for SSDs and the days when your new CPU was 2.5x as fast as the old one. There is no turning back after having experienced the buttery smoothness, and the impact is IMHO higher during regular usage than during games.
Tasker used to be in a class of its own but I believe shortcuts is now as powerful and it even has a user experience that isn't hostile! That might be a net benefit...
I hate the iOS keyboard and method of text selection but I could adopt.
I'll have to re buy some apps or find alternatives but that's not an impossible hill to climb.
The biggest pain points are file management and notifications. Having spent a decade plus on a blackberry before going Android full-time, neither dominant platform is even close to good with respect to notifications but Android is far less crappy than iOS.
File management is probably a deal breaker. Every time I have to download a file on my iPad and try to use it in another app or even just get it off the damn thing, I spend 5 minutes swearing before I just give up and attach the file to an email and then go to a PC to pull the file out of the draft folder...
Apple's hardware is just so much sleeker, faster, and better than Google's
This is such a ridiculously incorrect over-generalisation. China, Japan & Russia are obvious counter-examples, plus many others.
Last week I went to 240 hz and while it's noticeably even smoother, it wasn't nearly the upgrade, so there's certainly diminishing returns. Though I did go from IPS to OLED and THAT is really nice.
This is usually the point where someone will chime in and say something dumb like "The human eye can't see more than X frames per second" which is just hogwash. It's not about individual frames, but the fluidity of motion. At 60 fps, an object moving across the screen is moving 4x as many pixels per frame as 240 fps. When you get used to 240 fps, 60 fps feels like it's strobing.
Still quite frustrating that the display industry did it again in specifying a standard that makes most of what's interesting about it optional, so everyone can print it on their boxes without delivering the expected value.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/iphone/iph0b691d3ed/io...
I sincerely hope there is some alternative option in your country. In mine, I can still perform banking activity by going to a physical branch, by calling in, or by using the website with a physical 2FA token (i.e. not my phone). The bank keeps trying to get me to switch over to their app but I will continue to protest this until it's no longer possible to not use an app at which point I will likely switch banks.
IIRC you needed to be like in the region like every 30 days, else it updates to your current location (but don't quote me on it, I might be really misremembering the company/product)
It's an impactful and noticeable upgrade in addition to everything else being awesome, but for me it doesn't come close to being the the most important. If all else was equal or better, and I had to pick between 6k resolution or high refresh rate, I'd have a hard time picking refresh rate, but I'd prefer both.
They've got a billion-strong userbase and yet the Android app still dumped literally every attachment I received into my camera roll until I manually added '.nomedia' files in the right places.
And, oh man, the API for businesses is a Kafkaesque nightmare. Maybe it was good before it got Zucked, but I had to fight with their support for over a week to get an automated ban-hammer overturned... only for it to get auto-banned again two days later. We hadn't even deployed the damn thing yet!
Why I think I (over) reacted is that it was, to me, an example of only partial escape from US American insularity. They understood that ppl outside the USA don't use SMS much, but only suggested a US American messaging platform as what was used instead.
WhatsApp seems only to be used by the elderly/old in my circle of friends lately.
The transition has been gradual; started during the pandemic, I'd say.
No it wouldn't. Google as an org is bad at product and the fact AOSP exists is not why.
I've built AOSP based products multiple times over the years, and closed source Google Play Services has spent years picking off ever increasing swaths of the user-facing functionality covered by AOSP. I mean the writing was on the wall with Doze, but we don't even have a calculator anymore last I checked.
Google just can't make good products like Apple can.
Apple's worst products come from moments where they act like Google (becoming developer driven with weak top down direction), and vice versa. Fortunately for iOS users, neither org defaults to acting like the other.
My comment was in part addressing the higher up comments in the thread stating OEMs couldn't do a hard fork. My thoughts are that they have the marketshare that if Google's terms were bad enough, they could. They'd love to take some of the Play Store revenue, but currently dropping the Play Store would tank hardware sales as competitors would keep it. But if Google's terms were to get bad enough that multiple OEMs wanted to hard fork, that calculation could change. I don't foresee Google ever putting forth that bad of terms though, in part because of the option to hard fork.
Pixel 7, or any android in that era would definitely be slower than iPhone. ( Google Pixel itself uses mediocre SoC ) But the recent ones are catching up fast and latest Samsung is Snapdragon Elite is actually faster than iOS.
I think that is partly because Google had to optimise the hell out of its software due to slower CPU performance. And partly just Apple's iOS has fallen a lot in quality.
When you consider Africa + ASEAN + India has 3.5B population and has very low iPhone market share that sort of Skew the figures.
I have impression that WhatsApp team just dont do anything for years.
So no google, but still works. I think this is worth a try, considering how many adds you have to see on Android running full Google (which I have just one to be able to use Android Auto inside my car).
My experience from few european countries is that middle class - tech/business/law people have iOS. Go to tech or business conference and its all iphones.
So its really easy to be in such circles. I live in EU country and its all iMessage or Signal. Nobody uses WhatsApp if something its Facebook Messenger or Instagram messages.
There's a global setting for this: media visibility: off.
Then you can enable that per chat.
I have all chat images contained to only Whatsapp by default. Then I only enable some chats (family, friends) to expose images/videos to the phone.
Google Photos scoops those and backsup all family pictures shared to whatsapp to my Google Photos.
I'm the family's reliable source of truth when it comes to family photos.
And since iMessages are seamless they are used very often between iOS users.
That works fine (and is in fact easier than remembering the exact album) when I get to pick and choose exactly what I photograph/save, but it became borderline unusable once WhatsApp started vomiting hundreds of stupid GIFs and throwaway screenshots into it.
" For a while now, Google has been developing most parts of Android behind closed doors in its “internal branches,” with the “AOSP branch” only having certain other aspects of Android’s framework (including Bluetooth, kernel, and some other core components). As such, it’s been quite a while since the current state of AOSP is at the same level as Google’s internal builds, leaving developers and others to wait on Google to make a public release to get all of the new changes.
With this change to move everything to its internal, private development branch, Google isn’t changing the speed at which these new builds arrive. Rather, this will potentially streamline the process and prevent conflicts when merging the branch"