The worst of both worlds.
Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone can trust them.
It really only seems like a matter of time until they have stabbed every single one of their customers in the back.
...and at least consumers in that are not the customers, but the product...
It remains to be seen whether a non-profit entity can be trusted with such a position.
Over time, more and more functionality became linked to Google Play Services, which was not open source. The logical result of this was that OEMs simply went with the Google-approved proprietary flavour of Android.
but how come it's not reviving now that the biggest gorilla is gone?
There's some inherent commercial unfeasibility to RSS i think, which google uncovered by having a free client.
I mean, don't we still have that? I know that my RSS feed is still too content-free to keep up with (even after culling a double-digit number of hefty ones.)
And now we have even more RSS aggregators (Feedbin, The Old Reader, etc.) than we had before!
You don't get them with wholemeal bread.
The real frustration is that websites only put short extracts of their content into the RSS feed to force you to go and... look at their ads, I guess? But I'd imagine the number of folks using RSS feed readers who don't also use ad-blockers is vanishingly small.
I don't know how the RSS feed is configured if you set up a blogspot or wordpress blog now, let alone the newer blogging platforms or tools like Hugo.