Now, I do still care of being in control of my own hardware, but I do so on my server. I don't know of a cell phone that delivers what I want without being sold as a service rather than a standalone product. Best I can do is back up all my data to my own box and keep buying new phones when the batteries die.
On the individual scale, the sensor data was noisy, but in a dense environment with lots of sensors, the noise is identifiable and filterable to get solid pressure trends (actual pressure values is considerably harder).
They insist on updating to newer versions of the Play Store on very old hardware that doesn't actually have the hardware power to run it.
It's a huge problem if I tell a computer to do something and it doesn't do it, it does it half way, or it usually does it but sometimes doesn't. We engineers need to have a Hippocratic Oath that starts with: 1. Never put the company's need over the user's intent.
And, yes, I understand disk caches and why we have a graceful shutdown process. What irks me is that the computer might be in the middle of doing something despite my not having told it to be doing anything.
It could easily and even possibly be fairly argued that there's a massive difference between updating 3rd party apps and updating the operating system itself.
The Play services were originally an immutable part of the core OS, but it meant that security updates relied on the manufacturer to push updates, which were useless useless at doing.
I am minded that everyone would laugh at me if I took an un-patched Windows XP system on the internet, yet using ancient Android 4 is still common place. A PC can function offline where as most people can't isolate a phone (from multiple networks) without loosing the core functionality. The PC can be blank; phones usually contain all sorts of personal and private information.
Personally I want OS's to leave me the hell alone, but actually, I can't really blame them for trying to protect their users.
Updates to the OS come as OTA notifications that I can choose how and when to apply (download+install separately, for example). I don't monitor my Play Services version, but I assume that it's silently updating in the background, unlike either my apps or the OS itself.
Even if you turn off auto-updates, some things still auto update silently. A long time ago, I wrote a small utility which listened to the PACKAGE_ADDED and PACKAGE_REMOVED events (I don't know if it's still possible to listen to these events on recent Android versions). IIRC, there were two packages that always updated silently (wihout a notification icon) and automatically, even with automatic updates disabled: com.android.vending (Android Market/Google Play Store), and com.google.android.gms (Google Play Services).