Google stopped being aware of their customer's needs a really long time ago, they are so arrogant they think the audience is now fully captive.
Google's customers are advertisers. They cater to that segment very well. They only need to attract users with "free" and cheap services so that advertisers think their campaigns are reaching enough eyeballs. Whether or not that's the case, and whether or not the end user has a good experience, is hardly relevant.
It is, for the large sub-$800 segment of the smartphone market.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-16e
Which is still a valid argument, the number is just lower. And the UX on these sub 600 devices have definitely gotten worse over the last 5 years too... Likely because Google isn't really targeting that price point anymore, so Android isn't getting enough optimization to be viable on underpowered devices.
That was different in 2010-2020
This is why with Pixel they're focusing on competing with the iPhone, they want people to use Android so there is no point in competing with other Android manufacturer.
The chinese are mostly adding skins on top, not developing the core of the operating system.
There is however a chinese fork of android (state sponsored), but it has not gotten wide market adoption in china either to my knowledge, but i dont live in china so i'm open to be corrected.
Finally, even if that OS has gotten widely adopted in china - it IS a fork. the changes are not being upstreamed to android, hence irrelevant to the discussion on this forum.
The biggest Android market (internationally) are Chinese phones. If Google suddenly decided Play Store should be the only way to install apps, that doesn't affect Huawei and Xiaomi phones at all, they don't ship with Play Store and Play Services in the first place.
This isn't even a China-exclusive strategy, Samsung does the same with their Galaxy Store.
There must be a reason why Aurora Store is being advertised, though. Why would they do that if they could just pre-install Google Play Store and standard Google applications.
Update: End of 2018, I bought a Huawei phone with GApps. I remember that two or three generations later, Huawei was not allowed to include GApps anymore.
Chinese telephones legally imported usually have them in most relevant big markets like Indonesia, India, Brazil, etc.
The reason they probably have them preinstalled over there is because they don't care about licensing so they can freely preload whatever they want. At least that's how it was with netbooks in the early 2000s that they were selling loaded with MS Office, Windows, even Adobe, of course with no COA stickers.
But the same manufacturers sell Android phones with Play services in Europe, Japan, India, Indonesia, etc.
the audience is captive. Do you have a choice to move from android, if you didnt want to have an apple device? Do you want to use a different search engine other than google? Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own). Is there another browser other than chrome (and dont say firefox or edge - because both don't compete)?
Google behave in ways that they think makes them more profit. When users cannot migrate (nor even threaten to), then it simply means they can do this.
The strategy of doing everything you can to make sure your customers truly and utterly despise you and want to spit in your face is probably not productive.
I've been on Kimi now for 3 months. I rarely used Google in that time. Kimi is largely free though sometimes when I run of the free quota I fallback to DeepSeek/Perplexity. I have no idea where they are getting their index from though.
> Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own).
There is microsoft/apple/yahoo mailboxes. However, I think most people should pay for their email especially that it's cheap and also critical (2FA).
> Is there another browser other than chrome (and dont say firefox or edge - because both don't compete)?
Firefox is a solid fallback and also webkit (Apple) is now basically a different browser (ported to Linux on GNOME Web). Not the best situation though it could be worse (given Firefox situation).
For me personally, the only two things I still use Google for are chromium and maps. I am unlikely to move from Chromium anytime soon but might consider alternative for maps (though might still need maps for reviews/photos/street view).
I am the most bullish I've ever been on Google losing its monopoly especially after they botched AI and hyper-scaling.
Not wanting and not having a choice are two different things.
> Do you want to use a different search engine other than google? Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own)
My wife uses ddg and outlook, she's non-technical. I convinced her to use ddg but she's always used outlook/hotmail.
As a general statement, sure. But if we are talking about mobile phones this is a very privileged and unrealistic point of view.
According to chatgpt, 70-80% of mobile phone sold worldwide every year cost less than the cheaper iPhone.
Some people could probably stretch their budget and get the cheapest iPhone, but otherwise it seems safe to conclude that more than 50% of people simply have no choice.
People do stretch their budget when they really feel the need for it (and the poorest you are the more you'll want to prove you're not poor by buying a status symbol), also the second hand market is an easy way to get a cheap iPhone. Sure, it won't be the latest model...
My mom too. The difference though is that they have us. Most people don't.
Can I run an ad blocker in Android's Chrome? I can in Firefox
Yes, type yahoo.com into your browser, or install an app. Non-technical people love installing apps on their phones.
>Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own).
Yes, there are hundreds of good e-mail providers to use instead of Gmail. Easy for the non-technical person to use.
In Chrome on Android (and yeah, on desktop too) you just go into "Settings" and change your default search engine. I can choose between Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Yandex, or DuckDuckGo.
There are also custom searches through Wikipedia and other resources. You can use little shortcuts to get to almost any custom search you set up in advance.
This has been configurable by the user for a long, long, long time. This is not a surprise or a concession. This is built-in stuff by Google for Chrome. (Edge too, of course.)
Changing your browser, you can do, but it won't be comfortable. I have Edge installed on my Android, but it is not possible to run natively on Chromebook and the Android emulation is bad. I will not set Edge to my Default Browser because it messes things up. It is not a great experience to change your Default Browser on Android. I just go with Chrome and use Edge for specific tasks and topics.
You can set up all kinds of email services in the Gmail app, or you can install a native app. I use Outlook in both of those ways, and it's fine.
See it from the perspective of a non-technical user:
1. I install the Yahoo Search app
2. When I want to search I poke the Yahoo icon on my home screen.
Or:
1. I open my browser.
2. I poke Yahoo on the grid of suggested sites.
There are lots of non-technical users who navigate purely by doing a "google search" on whatever domain they're aiming for, too. Nobody said they were efficient about it.
It actually is, it just sounds more like it's Edge that isn't a great experience.
I've had Vivaldi as default for awhile now and it's great, everything is as seamless as using Chrome.
I think your issue is trying to switch off of Chrome while using a Chromebook.
The browsing experience without constant upselling some trash and proper adblockers are magnitudes better.
I'd still choose Firefox over it for the reasons you've mentioned.
reskined chrome are still ultimately taking google's changes downstream. For a while, it may be OK, but what happens when google changes the web standards to suit themselves? Will those reskinned browsers fork the standard?
Firefox _is competition_, but not competitive based on market share.
Maps is the last hold they have on me. I haven't yet bothered to find an alternative.