Comment by GeekyBear
6 days ago
Google selling Android as both open source and open to running any software you like in order to quickly gain market share, only to break those promises after driving competing platforms out of the market is nothing more than fraud.
Their trial proved that even if you lose you can still keep your monopoly.
It took them 17 years to finally pull the cage all the way shut. A long con indeed.
You think it's an accident that they've been abandoning developer APIs and replacing them with closed source Play Store versions for a decade now?
Not at all. I’m just sort of impressed that, like I said, they it took them this long to fully close it now.
Other hyperbole notwithstanding, Google has pretty clearly done an extremely bad job of driving competing platforms out of the smartphone market.
Tell it to Blackberry, Windows Phone, WebOS and the Nokia N900.
there's also Palm OS (Palm, '96-'09), Maemo (Nokia, '05-'11), Moblin (Intel, '07-'09), webOS (LG, '09+), Bada (Samsung, '10-'13), Ubuntu Touch (Canonical, '11+), Tizen (Linux Foundation, Samsung, '12+), Firefox OS (Mozilla, '13-'15), KaiOS (FirefoxOS fork, '17+), Sailfish OS (Jolla, '13+), LuneOS (WebOS Ports community, '14+), postmarketOS (Oliver Smith, '16+), Mobian (Debian, '20), EMUI (Huawei, google-free since '20)...
yeah "Google has pretty clearly done an extremely bad job" at making competitors obsolete. Intel, Samsung, Nokia, etc. are all tiny companies who had no chance anyway, especially at the time before Android was firmly established as one of two platforms mobile developers bother making software for
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... says otherwise; while Android variants have allowed other manufacturers to gain footholds, and some even are "de-Google-fied" in terms of services... all of them stem from a codebase that has been designed to be compatible with, if not explicitly promote, Google's revenue streams.
Imagine, if you will, an adblocker that could run across not just web pages but all apps, in a privacy-protecting and declarative way. Google has every incentive to simply slow-walk the OS-level support necessary for this kind of system, perhaps citing legitimate security concerns, but certainly not allocating resources towards solving the problem in earnest. And if you hard-fork Android to do this kind of deep work, rather than just maintaining packages or patchsets, you'll be forced to dedicate tremendous resources towards maintaining that fork to keep up with mainline fixes/APIs. (And that's just the tip of the iceberg.)
So it's an incredibly effective chilling effect in practice, quite intentionally so.
Sounds like your describing a DNS adblocker; works regardless of device.
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