Litterally the DuckDuckGo blog announcing that they are doing fabulously.
So great they are making >$100mil a year from monetizing peoples search while fighting the evil companines that disgustingly monetize peoples search.
Google Search on mobile is virtually all ads. On desktop it's going that way too.
The issue is that profit motive nd competitive factors leaves an insatiable appetite to optimize at all costs and society becomes the losers at some point because those efficiency gains have to come from somewhere.
It is not all bad for us, android is there because google wanted to be in everyone's pocket . It is unlikely OEMs would have come together on their and setup a common platform, it would have been diffusion of platforms difficult to switch between or write code for
I wouldn't consider Android good. At least in the age of bespoke phone OSes things were so bad that you could easily avoid having a phone.
Android only unified the market( maybe sped the transition /made it bigger) it didn't really trigger the shift to smartphones.
Anyone working in the embedded world will greatly appreciate how awsome this is in android world, all the OEMs are terrible at making documentation and getting access is super hard unless you are working at Big Co.
Microsoft / IBM did something similar with PC and windows software standardization earlier. Windows APIs had their problems sure, but one of reasons Windows became so big was a direct result of stuff worked between major versions, back in the 90's they were fanatically focused on backward compatibility and it really made the difference.
A large external push is always needed for OEMs to follow open / documented standards, they are traditionally/ culturally opaque , perhaps another player like Microsoft could have done it better/differently.
However I doubt without an large market maker(with their own agenda) involved I am doubtful we would gotten anything decent.