Their leadership is literally sh*tting on anyone by shutting down service after service in the faces of whoever made the mistake of building something on those services. They already lost their credibility it goes beyond that now - at this rate, they will attract the attention of the regulators: A gigantic monopoly controlling vast swaths of the internet and playing with people's money, time, businesses, and livelihoods like they are their pet projects...

Unless you mean that these leaders are taking their pants off and depositing feces on people, they are not "literally shitting on" anyone. They are figuratively shitting on people.

Why-not-both.jpg

Literally has also meant figuratively for a while now.

You're wrong actually, go check a dictionary

Which is probably part of the reason Flutter is getting shuttered. The Google brand is too unreliable to capture developer mindshare now.

But Flutter was the way out of all the fragmented historical legacy Android APIs and offers a cross-platform development experience.

Flutter isn't getting shuttered though? AFAICT these are company-wide layoffs that are affecting the Flutter team.

That the current team has just been mown by the latest swing of the scythe, doesn't mean the product is being killed.

At least in some other cases, other teams are being spun up or being changed to take on these projects.

Of course, that doesn't mean this isn't disruptive or unfortunate.

> (obviously Android isn’t included in this).

Why? Android is a never ending grind to support due to api churn.

Because outside of deploying your app as a web application there aren’t a lot of other ways to get your app onto Android devices aside from… developing Android apps.

So make a PWA.

Let's not forget, AOSP is still maintained by different individuals aside from Google. Google is mainly interested in integrating it's own "GApps" ecosystem, which introduces ridiculous amount of telemetry and degrades the security of the phone

(I never participated in the AOSP project or read the commit logs, so this is just gathered from news)

My impression is that big features come directly from Google, although I do know that OEMs contribute things here and here, like Sony "donating" LDAC upstream.

> You’re just doing it to yourself at this point if you have any other alternative

alternatives can also disappear.

Can websites disappear?

I've seen it happen

Well, Android development has noticably slowed down and got less attention. Look at Android 14 page. What are those "new features"? Not really worth talking about it you compare with previous versions. And Android 14 barely got mentioned in the previous Google IO.

Meanwhile there is so much that needs improvement in Android. To begin with, password Autofill. Compared to iOS, this is a nightmare.

Ehhh, I've barely managed to keep up with all the changes to Android. Things like permissions/security, Jetpack, Material 3. I'm happy to let them slow down for a bit.

> To begin with, password Autofill. Compared to iOS, this is a nightmare.

Really, my practical experience has been the other way around.

And this seems to be the general consensus. iOS autofill is terrible compared to Android's.

Android at this point is a mature OS we are only going to be seeing polishing at this point.

In my team I have a policy to not depend on Google, apart from obviously, Android.

Their KTLO on every product is absolute poo — will take an MS equivalent any day of the week.

I mean Microsoft Access is still around