There's a problem with this theory though, that the utility of some of these programs is in how many users (and thus content, etc) they have
So we can't really "favor products that specifically target power users" as YouTube or Google Maps alternatives -- or, rather, we could, but they'd be weaker in the polish, content, user base department (e.g. Vimeo or some advanced Maps platform)
There is no average person. Different person have different use cases and preferences. No person wants known liked things to be removed or made less good.
Apple devices are meant for Apple power users. I use Windows and Linux (KDE) and I am uncomfortable and constraint on Mac OS.
There is a reason why people spend (or spent) hours to discover and learn even their phone or TV software.
Have you missed dozes of HN posts and threads about git being overcomplicated and overengineered? A lot of software engineers would love for git to remove a lot of features they don't use because they find it too complex. (For the record, I personally don't agree with them at all, but it is a very popular opinion).
Hell, many routinely rebase and squash commits for the sake of simplicity, throwing out a truthful development history.
Even so, most people are more alike than different.
It annoys the fuck out of me when someone says that a phone that still doesn't exist and isn't available for purchase is mentioned as an "alternative".
It will become an alternative once it's out. Until such time comes, stop mentioning it when discussing alternatives.
And what’s the point if the baseband is not open?
Gmail: any email service
Android: root it, use a custom launcher and utility apps.
GMaps: Waze (lets you provide your own speech samples, even)
You don't have to secede from these whole platforms - just extend around them and reach into them.
You’re examples:
Google.
Your examples are all fucking google.
OP's question was about how power users can keep UX control while services degrade their features to cater to average users. That's what I care about, not ideological purity in my software stack.
People like you are the tech equivalents of the militant vegan.
Because that means more money and effort spend by the vendor to maintain 2 sets of interfaces (and extra flags and features they could just cut entirely),
and that for the benefit of a tiny sliver of its user base, and the worst and most picky at that.
I realize it's axiomatic that 'to serve the customer is self-evidently the best thing for the service provider, because capitalism', but by now I think that is obviously marketing spin to cover actions in self-interest… no matter who claims it. Starkly, obviously false.
Gmail users are clearly not customers, they are not paying anything for it. Your cynicism against capitalism is unwarranted in this case.
I think this is the "excuse" but to me it seems like it's as much about "locking down" as "dumbing down".
History moves in cycles [0] and I'm seeing something like how we transitioned from Home Computers to game consoles in the mid 90s.
Hackers are experts at getting value out of equipment that the manufacturers never expected, and this is what you want with a nascent technology, to help build a market. But as things mature, as a business you want to lock down more and more of this creative potential for yourself and lock in the revenue.
We've seen it with music like this: Vinyl (locked down) -> tapes (hackable) -> CDs (locked down) -> CD Writers -> MP3s (hackable) -> Streaming (locked down) -> ... (tapes? [1])
We've seen it with home computing like this: Pong & Atari -> Commodore, Spectrum, Apple II -> NES, Master System -> Amiga, Atari ST -> SNES, Genesis -> PC -> Playstation -> The Apple Renaissance -> The Ripened Apple
Even on a smaller scale I can see Apple's pivot from "Rip, Mix, Burn" [2] to doing away with personal music altogether over the course of 10 years [3]
Or my PS4 where I'm more and more likely to just download a game now than go out to the shops and buy a disc.
At each stage there is a trade-off. You get a slightly more polished product, but you lose a certain degree of agency over it. I guess it's cyclical because the "locking down" goes a little too far and then people loses interest and then you need to bring in the hackers again to jump start the community once more. I'm sure there's some tie in with the innovators dilemma [4]
I think the only popular industry I can think of that has resisted broad-scale hacking is the movie industry. I can only speculate that the scale, and political importance meant they had to always stay ahead of the curve.
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/06/cassette-tapes-are-back-ki...
[2] https://www.macworld.com/article/2934175/think-retro-rip-rip...
[3] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/04/06/apple-shutting-i...
The average person has totally different needs and usage patterns than power users. If you want to avoid this phenomena, where the services you use slowly degrade and lose features, favor products that specifically target power users. Products for the general population, like Android, Youtube, and Windows, will over time degrade more and more towards some lowest common denominators.