Comment by ajross

6 days ago

Other hyperbole notwithstanding, Google has pretty clearly done an extremely bad job of driving competing platforms out of the smartphone market.

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ajross

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GeekyBear  6 days ago

Tell it to Blackberry, Windows Phone, WebOS and the Nokia N900.

  • lucb1e  6 days ago

    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

btown  6 days ago

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.