Google: track every detail of your life and use it to serve up ads that support their bottom line. Implements changes that serve themselves at your expense.
F-Droid et al: build cool open-source software cause they like cool open-source software. Implements changes because they make the software better.
I understand you're frustrated, but there are a lot of us at Google who are also just trying to build cool open-source software, and in cases such as mine, building it so that others can use it to build even better things with less work. =(
But you're still there to make Google more money. What do you do when they tell you to build a feature that's supposed to Extend and Extinguish? I'm guessing often you wouldn't even really know.
>Google: track every detail of your life and use it to serve up ads that support their bottom line. Implements changes that serve themselves at your expense.
I think you're missing the part where a user benefits from their services.
I mean, it's not as if users get nothing out of this arrangement. The vast majority of users feel they're getting a good deal. Just because you don't think it's a good deal for you, don't impose it on others.
I feel that, for the most part, what google offers is fair enough. There are some instances, however, where they completely ignore the needs/desires of their users though.
Google Home Page and Reader are the big two... both extremely popular, and plenty of opportunity there. Hell, at this point, I'd like to see Google offer a website similar to what I get on my phone's new tab screen now (articles of interest). I find it hard to actually trust any google services beyond search and gmail (only hoping they don't nix gmail without a LOT of notice).
Cons: You end up in Apple's high walled closed source garden. And have to deal with whatever they remove from the next iteration of the device based on their whims and fancies. And the exorbitant price tag.
> You end up in Apple's high walled closed source garden.
Google’s ecosystem is just as negative as apples walled garden. If you want, you can build and sign your own apps and put them on your device on an iPhone.
> And have to deal with whatever they remove from the next iteration of the device based on their whims and fancies.
I presume you’re talking about the headphone jack, which google followed up by removing from their pixel phone 12 months later? Why does apple get the hate here and not google?
> And the exorbitant price tag.
An iPhone 8 is £699 new right now, and a pixel 2 is £629. An 8 is £48 a month, and a pixel 2 is £53/month on contract (I’m sure there are better deals but I’m on a phone) - it’s disonfeuous to call apple out for having expensive Hugh end devices when the google equivalent is just as expensive.
"Google's ecosystem" is Android, not just their overpriced pixel phones, so Google get hate in some quarters for losing the headphone socket but it's not an Android thing. You can pay a few hundred pounds for a perfectly good Android phone and run as-is or replace with a true open source alternative, with headphone sockets (so no need to turn your lossless files into a streamed lossy mess courtesy of Bluetooth). I pay £9 for 4 gigs of data. In no way is Apple anything like at parity with Android here. With Android you choose what you pay and what you get. I'm bored of phones and apps now, so I'm out of the "spend a grand every two years/£50+ a month for an average camera and the ability to choose to install about 15 of the 17 million apps out there" game but if that's your thing there's a phone for you. With a headphone socket.
> If you want, you can build and sign your own apps and put them on your device on an iPhone.
HA! Sure. For $100 a year. And from a Mac.
> I presume you’re talking about the headphone jack, which google followed up by removing from their pixel phone 12 months later? Why does apple get the hate here and not google?
Because Pixel is not the only choice one has inside the Android ecosystem, as opposed to iOS one? Samsung, Sony and others still have the jack afaik.
I agree with you about price though. Apple is no more expensive than others (considering the quality of build).
If they can prevent it Apple will of course not allow you to run any pirated app you want. That’s the flip side of being on the platform where developers actually earn money.
> Off topic. Using F-Droid, you don't need to touch Google's ecosystem.
Absolutely. I still don't get why I can't compile and deploy my own apps on my own devices without paying Apple $99 a year.
I thought it was really cool that you can deploy apps you compile yourself on your device out of the app store without paying the $99 yearly fee but apparently that's not the case.
> There are three levels: $300/yr for "enterprise" allows you to deploy your app on a large number of devices within your organization (and the terms of service are very explicit that the devices must be under your control: not even for testing by a customer at an off-site location unless you are overseeing), $100/yr for an individual or company normal developer license that lets you install your app for testing purposes on up to 100 of your devices for one year (after which point the apps expire and you have to reinstall them), or $0 for truly "free" provisioning (no yearly fee) which lets you install up to three apps (total; not per account: across all free accounts any device can have only three such apps) on a device using a slightly limited set of APIs (for example: no VPN support) which expire every seven days.
> Clearly the free tier is pretty worthless in the grand scheme of things, and being able to write software for you but not being able to legitimately give it to anyone else not also paying the $100/yr "please let me own the piece of hardware you sold me instead of renting it" tax is not really acceptable for people trying to learn to write software as a big part of software is being able to give it to other people. In practice, though, a lot of people are seriously only learning to develop so that one day they can pay the full Apple developer tax and deploy their apps to the App Store under the Apple software approval process, and so it works out: like, to them, software development is all about writing software for Apple hardware under Apple's rules, and that's what Apple wants anyway. The entire scenario makes me feel a little sick: this shouldn't even be legal as far as I'm concerned.
> I thought it was really cool that you can deploy apps you compile yourself on your device out of the app store without paying the $99 yearly fee but apparently that's not the case.
It's the case as long as you manually recompile them once a week when the code signing cert expires. It is deliberately impractical to actually distribute apps this way.
so you know what all the google play services are doing on your phone? You can compile apps from source and put them on your own phone, you just cant distribute your own compiled apps without a paid developer account.
Ah, got it, that's unfortunate. I remember some time ago, Mozilla said that they wouldn't put a browser on iOS unless it could use Gecko. When I saw the app I assumed that the restrictions had changed.
This is exactly what we mean when we say closed garden and extortion. If firefox wants to exist on the platform, they have to play by apple rules. Apple are just fine without firefox so they don't care.
Mozilla has done the best they can, given the restrictions imposed on them by Apple.
This effectively means that Firefox on iOS has no support for extensions or addons like on Android... Because Apple and Safari doesn't allow that.
It's definitely not what people have come to expect from Firefox over the years, but at least I get to seamlessly sync my bookmarks, history and passwords with my desktop browser of choice.
Apple iPhone: mostly works as long as you agree with the Apple way of doing things. No alternative web browser for you, no expandable memory, no 3.5mm jack if you want a recent device, no full control over your device. Very limited choice of hardware from a single supplier. Expensive hardware, this mostly related to the issue of there only being a single supplier. Hardware also with well-documented problems which tend not to be solved [1].
You need to trust Apple. What makes you think you can trust them? Remember that Google started life with 'do no evil' as their motto, people tended to trust them as well. Lately, not so much anymore.
If you don't feel these issues are valid or think they don't matter Apple can be an option but it does not make sense to portray them as the solution which 'just works'.
Google: track every detail of your life and use it to serve up ads that support their bottom line. Implements changes that serve themselves at your expense.
F-Droid et al: build cool open-source software cause they like cool open-source software. Implements changes because they make the software better.