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Buying an Android phone is no longer enough — Google wants you to subscribe too (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 3 months ago* by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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Buying Android phone is increasingly just the entry fee for Google’s AI ecosystem.

The direction of travel is clear: Google is pushing AI harder and harder to redefine its ecosystem and bring new, powerful features to users. Android’s core OS remains free, but Google increasingly appears to view it less as a product and more as a delivery mechanism for its AI services. As those services become more central to the modern smartphone experience, many of the platform’s most ambitious features are also becoming subscription products.

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[–] 38 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Personally I don't think the side loading will kill them. It'll happen and nothing will change.

Perhaps the ai bubble burst could damage them enough, but they are way to big of a monopoly to fall. And android alternatives still scare people as unlike PC, you may brick your phone, or be locked out of apps due to play services

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  • [–] 46 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I'm hopeful for the Motorola grapheme OS phone breaking some of that hold. It's slated for release next year.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    When my current phone ages out, my next phone has HarmonyOS.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I hope you speak Mandarin. App availability outside the PRC seems to be pretty close to zero. Unless you think it's time for round 3 of a webapp-based OS? iPhone OS couldn't do it in 2008 and webOS couldn't do it in 2010, but 5G exists now, so it should at least be better. I'm still not sure about good.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I live in China. My SO has a HarmonyOS phone already. Interestingly it has a setting to display everything in English (among a lot of other languages).

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Sounds like that's one more viable option for ~15% of the world's population, then! The rest of us have to wait for something that can run Android (or I guess iOS somehow) apps.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Or, you know, wait until Huawei shakes out the big features and ensures they're bug-free before they start selling outside of the PRC.

    You don't think that China is their end-game, do you?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Well they're literally illegal in the US, so I'm pretty SOL regardless, but even if they have designs on the rest of the world, Apple and Google have several million apps' worth of a head start. We'll see if Huawei can do what Samsung and Palm/HP couldn't.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Apple has priced itself way out of most of the world's market. And Google ... well, let's just say that its current trajectory will make leaving its ecosystem viable and desirable for most people within five years.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Yes, but I'd expect an Android fork that still runs APKs to be the next move. I think it'll take quite a while to get every random bank and streaming app on there.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    It's possible ... but somehow I just don't have a lot of faith in the open source community to actually make things that appeal to the broader user world. The things that tech types value (summarizable, albeit very coarsely, as a single word: control) are not what the average end users value (summarizable, again very coarsely, as a single word: convenience).

    For instance I run Linux at home now because I'm doing "elbows up" and I don't want Microsoft's crappy AI-jammed-into-my-every-orifice bullshit. But the only reason I can do that is because my SO is a techie so I have someone there for when, not if, Linux decides that it hates its users and does something incomprehensible. (So far chiefly around audio.)

    If I had a non-technical SO I would not be able to make that switch from Microsoft ... because what I value ("getting my shit done instead of someone else's") is at loggerheads with what Linux offers ("know every little detail of every little nook and cranny of your system with text that bears an astonishing resemblance to old-timey modem text over noisy lines").

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