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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

I might be the dumbest observer on these trends around here but does it seem to somebody else that this is a normal part of the end-of-life lifecycle of many devices and that it usually goes like this...

- "Sir, sales are falling... we actually haven't had new sales in months".

- "How much does it cost to support the infrastructure for these devices?"

- "X million a month".

- "Feck it. Cram ads into them, we're not supporting those things for free!"

...or is it just me?

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I think there's some of that, but this wasn't done by the people who made and sold the hardware, nVidia. This was done by Google.

Another post said that Google's certifications require that the device manufacturer keep the stock launcher, which would mean that nVidia couldn't and can't do anything about this directly.

nVidia is still selling plenty of these boxes and it would absolutely ruin their business if they started cramming ads into paid products.

I don't think NVidea is getting any of the revenue for these ads. If I understand it right, Google is getting the revenue...the launcher is Google's app.

Gods, that's even worse then! So NVIDIA will have to deal with Google just randomly deciding to monetize a launcher...?

Yes, that's the essence of the problem. Android TV devices have to use Google's launcher as the default, or they have to go fully on their own, without Google services, like a FireTV device.

Well, it seems that Google (and various other corporations) are finally entering their endgame and are showing their true colors. I am eager to find out if the world can fight back meaningfully.

Here's hoping. {raises glass}

The only way to solve this is to break up Google (or rather Alphabet) but I don't see this happening. Anti-trust got way too soft.

Why do you think that breaking Google apart would make the portions that don't directly receive money from advertisements less likely to sell ad space?

I'm pretty sure it's the opposite, having worked in the set-top-box industry. What makes you say that ?

It feels that way with the Smart TVs. Once you've purchased it the manufacturer no longer has a way to make additional money from it. Yet these things are connected to the internet and wildly insecure. So the only way to justify future updates is to shoehorn in some adtech along with the security patches.

> So the only way to justify future updates is to shoehorn in some adtech along with the security patches.

I'd say it's the exact opposite: the way to justify adtech, i.e. the thing they actually wanted from the start, is by playing up the importance of automated updates to security. Note how devices tend to stop being updated the moment their market share is projected to dwindle.

I remember when Apple used to charge for MacOS and iOS updates. In many ways this aligned incentives much better. Many of the MacOS and iOS updates in the past few years have mostly existed to drive subscription revenue for their new services. I'd love them to actually have to deliver real value with software updates and be paid for it.

The whole iCloud “omg almost out of space!!” nag screens really irked me on iOS, and doubly so because of their usage of private APIs to both show those nag screens and how the iCloud service works in a way that no other service can, again due to the private APIs they use. I pay for it now begrudgingly because it does “just work”, but I also hate them for it as I’d rather have a choice of cloud storage providers that could automatically back my photos up in the same reliable and integrated way that iCloud does.

I used to use the One Drive app to backup my photos on my iDevices. The biggest pain was the first upload taking forever and it was not automatic. My use case was a secondary back up so it didn’t bother me.

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