I don’t care if anyone has a Xiaomi, Oneplus, Samsung, etc. Each brand is using a modified version of Android, and they chose to be compatible with each other. But for example the “blue vs green bubble” drama is a thing specifically because of Apple locking their unsuspecting users into a closed ecosystem. And it sure isn’t Android’s fault for not being compatible with it.
The more power a company like this gains, the worse will it be for the whole industry.
There is plenty to criticize about Apple when it comes to anti-consumer and anti-competitive business practices…
But if you’re gonna talk on the level of “evil” and “freedom”, Apple’s greatest sin is their supply chain.
And then there’s Google, whose evil I would place somewhere between [Apple’s] pseudo-monopoly and [Apple’s] pseudo-slavery. At least Apple is a tech company. Google is a surveillance company that just happens to make tech so they can monitor you more closely.
Working with the shared-space AR APIs in iOS and Android really drove home the difference in their priorities. The iOS SDK only allowed us to share AR data through a local, SDK-managed connection. The data is opaque, can’t be directly serialized, and doesn’t work anyway if you try to persist/distribute it yourself. Android, on the other hand… They wanted us to upload your AR data to Google-owned servers, where they could do Google-knows-what with the scans of your living room.
It’s sad that we’re at a point where you have to either pay for your privacy, or pay with your privacy. But we can at least not be naive about it. Android is more interoperable, more prolific, and more lenient with third-party code. And that’s because it’s a good strategy if you’re a surveillance giant. Not because it’s good for consumers.