reminds me of when I tried to switch to DuckDuckGo for a few months. At first I thought it would be easy: just change the default on my phone and laptop. But on my Android phone, Chrome kept “helpfully” nudging me back to Google whenever I opened a new tab, and even my smart speaker would default to Google no matter what. I ended up constantly battling defaults and hidden settings, and after a while it honestly wore me down.

So even though I technically could switch, the friction made it feel like Google had already won before I started. It’s not that alternatives don’t exist, it’s that they’re buried under a pile of defaults and contracts that make everyday users (like me) give up sooner or later.

That sounds like anticompetitive case or two, anybody?

Everyone else does the same, Microsoft and Apple, it seems like nobody cares. "Its just a bug!" they say, but somehow those bugs always benefit themselves...