Comment by ssl-3

Eh? Samsung still maintains a whole suite of independent alternative apps, providing things ranging from NFC payments to calendaring and contact management, that they stuff onto their phones in addition to the usual Google fare.

Until very recently, most/all of their phones had alternative Samsung-produced chipsets available in various markets (Exynos).

They've got their own app store as a built-in.

And they also maintain their own small-system operating system, with Tizen, in case it all goes to shit.

They've been working very hard on parallel development for quite a long time. They're probably better-prepared to jump ship than any other top-tier manufacturer of Android cell phones is.

Motorola Mobility? That was spun out of the stodgy-big batwing mothership in Chicago a long time ago -- and first purchased by Google, before being sold to Lenovo. Subsequent to Google's influence, whatever remains is ill-prepared to jump ship, but that was certainly a design intent. That behemoth is much more dug-in.

So the outlook is certainly gloomy, but it's not all darkness.

(In terms of things like banks only supporting one OS or another: Gosh. Prior to the entrenchment of the smart phone age, I never installed a company-specific consumer banking application on any computing devices at all. It was OK. I just used Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web to do that stuff, sometimes with a side dose of SMS on my dumb-phone for active notifications.

And still today, I don't have banking apps for most of the companies that I do banking-stuff with -- and I get along fine with keeping track of the money I have, the money I owe, and the bills I need to pay.

Maybe the right answer here is to shore up the utility of the platform-independent WWW.)