Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?

      • RGB3x3@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        17
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’ve been feeling lately that Google has lost the plot. Material You is an ugly, inconsistent mess, usability is worse, and you can’t expect any feature to stick around because Google is so unreliable.

        Android 11 was the last version that felt refined and stable. It was clean, usable, and organized.

        • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          1 year ago

          I’m going to say 10 because I think 11 was when they first started making it difficult to move apps to SD card external storage and for me that was the beginning of the fuckery.

          • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            It’s hard to justify keeping a feature around that potentially breaks new features for such a small population tbh.

        • Dark_Blade@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Honestly, it feels like Google lost the plot (for the most part) almost a decade ago. Android was really the only product that was consistently chugging along; most of their projects have been nothing but premature cancellations, even if the product was actually good (I’m looking at you, Inbox).

          • RGB3x3@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            I’m currently really mad at them for setting up to cancel Google Podcasts just so they can move podcasts into YouTube Music.

            Why do these companies keep having to consolidate functions into ever-more complex apps? What happened to the separation of function so that they do one thing really well instead of many things poorly?

      • CMahaff@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        26
        ·
        1 year ago

        Looked up the history and they bought it so early on that effectively the whole thing was developed by Google.

        They bought the startup in 2005 and the first phone came out in 2008.

        • rivingtondown@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          What do you mean by this? What did Motorola Droid phones have to do with Google owning Android or Android being it’s own company back in like… 2003? The first Droid used Android as developed by Google in 2009. Google had aquired Android years prior to Droid being a thing. Most Android devices are not created by Google, even to this day.

          • papalonian@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            I didn’t realize that Google owned the company at that time. I don’t remember the advertisements blasting Google’s name like they tend to do now. I know that most Android phones aren’t made by Google, I was mistaken in thinking the Droid was a popular android device prior to acquisition

            • notatoad@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              “droid” was actually a verizon brand, not motorola or google. any droid-branded phone was a verizon rebranding of a phone that was sold as something else outside the US.

              but yeah, android never existed outside of google. Google bought out android before their first public release.

    • mlg@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I think android 7 was where it peaked with development and features.

      It’s been jvm dalvik hell since then with Google taking a dump on the Linux kernel.

      • davidgro@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        Perhaps 8 or 9 in my opinion - removing background clipboard access in 10 was a Huge defeature.

        I jumped from 8 to 13 on my (new) personal devices, so I missed a lot of firsthand experience, but the clipboard thing still affected me by making apps like Google Translate worse.

        13 does seem pretty nice in a lot of ways - notifications are even more capable than they were in 8, for example. But I do notice it being more restrictive in some ways too.

    • Dark_Blade@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      YouTube too. For all the shit we give Google for it, there’s no way it could’ve grown into what it is if it didn’t have all that spare cash to burn.