Why the surprise, they do the same with search, they do the same with their Google workspace (the degree to which they are pushing AI is really hurting the product).
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.
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.
This market still exists and is pretty strong, especially outside of US. It's all on Android so Google doesn't need to try to compete here.
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.
I'm talking about the Google services which is where Google profits. Chinese phones ship without them. When I said "Google's Android", I meant Android+Google Services. The people buying cheap Android phones are most likely not buying Pixels. Even Samsungs aren't exactly cheap anymore. I'm not talking about Android forks. I'm talking about customized Android without Google services.
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.
That's false. The ones you can get here in Slovenia don't have them. I've personally helped quite a few friends sideload them. I also remember how shocked people were to find out there's no YouTube or Play Store after buying a Huawei or Xiaomi phone when that first came into effect.
So the national carrier importing them and selling them in their brick-and-mortar stores is "bootleg imports"? Not to mention that the EU is, legally speaking, a single market so the same rules should apply everywhere.
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.
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.
I'd agree if you picked Google Docs or something like that, but Gmail? Chrome?? Come on! Edge is just Chrome with extra features, plenty of people use Bing without even noticing and many even non-techy people are fine with DuckDuckGo, good free email providers are everywhere (yahoo, hotmail, proton...).
There are non-google android OS's you can install (it's easy these days). Kagi is nice for search. Fastmail is nice for mail. Brave is a fine browser (though I'm aware that it's a chrome derivative). It just takes a bit of determination.
Maps is the last hold they have on me. I haven't yet bothered to find an alternative.
Why are saying that Firefox or even Chrome reskin can't compete with Chrome? I haven't been using Chrome for maybe 10 years or more, so I'm genuinely interested. Even if you hate Firefox, something like Brave is felt the same way but without google's garbage. I heard there are new guys in town like Helium and other Chromium based browser which choose to remove telemetry, support manifest v2, adblocks and so on.
The browsing experience without constant upselling some trash and proper adblockers are magnitudes better.
> Do you have a choice to move from android, if you didnt want to have an apple device?
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.
> Not wanting and not having a choice are two different things.
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.
I see poor looking people with iPhones all the time.
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...
the move don't have to be permanent, there are alternatives and as we increase our usage and give active feedback and commit to invest even little money in them, they will improve too. I've seen this pattern a thousand times the monopoly gets worst and worst until a revolutionary new tech will rise it applies to social concepts, business sectors, companies, mother-in-laws, etc.
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.
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.
> Do you want to use a different search engine other than google?
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.
Once an alternative to one of their things, like immich, becomes viable, people run as fast as they can.
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.
Google's AI in their docs suite is so bafflingly bad. I wanted their AI to automate a sheet for me and it just choked. I switched to Claude for making a sheet that I ended up hosting in my local NAS using Microsoft Excel format.
Embedded AIs always suck. It's a dead end, long-term. By its nature, AI subsumed software products, reducing them to tool calls for general-purpose AI runtime.
> Google stopped being aware of their customer's needs a really long time ago
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.
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.