Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?
Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?
Android being bought by Google
Up to a point, now it feels worse and worse every new version.
I’ve been feeling lately that Google has lost the plot. Material You is an ugly, inconsistent mess, usability is worse, and you can’t expect any feature to stick around because Google is so unreliable.
Android 11 was the last version that felt refined and stable. It was clean, usable, and organized.
I’m going to say 10 because I think 11 was when they first started making it difficult to move apps to SD card external storage and for me that was the beginning of the fuckery.
It’s hard to justify keeping a feature around that potentially breaks new features for such a small population tbh.
Honestly, it feels like Google lost the plot (for the most part) almost a decade ago. Android was really the only product that was consistently chugging along; most of their projects have been nothing but premature cancellations, even if the product was actually good (I’m looking at you, Inbox).
I’m currently really mad at them for setting up to cancel Google Podcasts just so they can move podcasts into YouTube Music.
Why do these companies keep having to consolidate functions into ever-more complex apps? What happened to the separation of function so that they do one thing really well instead of many things poorly?
You know out of all things i miss the candy names
It seems they still use dessert-based codenames internally. Apprently, Android 13 is Tiramisu, and Android 14 is Upside-Down Cake.
We’d be up to Android “Toffee” with Android “Uncooked Cookie Dough” coming out soon.
🤯 Holy crap how did I not know this! I thought they developed it in house!
Looked up the history and they bought it so early on that effectively the whole thing was developed by Google.
They bought the startup in 2005 and the first phone came out in 2008.
Android used to be it’s own thing, check out the “Droid” phones.
The Droid turbo phone did nothing wrong.
I think android 7 was where it peaked with development and features.
It’s been jvm dalvik hell since then with Google taking a dump on the Linux kernel.
Perhaps 8 or 9 in my opinion - removing background clipboard access in 10 was a Huge defeature.
I jumped from 8 to 13 on my (new) personal devices, so I missed a lot of firsthand experience, but the clipboard thing still affected me by making apps like Google Translate worse.
13 does seem pretty nice in a lot of ways - notifications are even more capable than they were in 8, for example. But I do notice it being more restrictive in some ways too.
YouTube too. For all the shit we give Google for it, there’s no way it could’ve grown into what it is if it didn’t have all that spare cash to burn.