Buying Android phone is increasingly just the entry fee for Google’s AI ecosystem.

The direction of travel is clear: Google is pushing AI harder and harder to redefine its ecosystem and bring new, powerful features to users. Android’s core OS remains free, but Google increasingly appears to view it less as a product and more as a delivery mechanism for its AI services. As those services become more central to the modern smartphone experience, many of the platform’s most ambitious features are also becoming subscription products.

      • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 days ago

        I hope you speak Mandarin. App availability outside the PRC seems to be pretty close to zero. Unless you think it’s time for round 3 of a webapp-based OS? iPhone OS couldn’t do it in 2008 and webOS couldn’t do it in 2010, but 5G exists now, so it should at least be better. I’m still not sure about good.

        • ZDL@lazysoci.al
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          7 days ago

          I live in China. My SO has a HarmonyOS phone already. Interestingly it has a setting to display everything in English (among a lot of other languages).

          • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            7 days ago

            Sounds like that’s one more viable option for ~15% of the world’s population, then! The rest of us have to wait for something that can run Android (or I guess iOS somehow) apps.

            • ZDL@lazysoci.al
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              7 days ago

              Or, you know, wait until Huawei shakes out the big features and ensures they’re bug-free before they start selling outside of the PRC.

              You don’t think that China is their end-game, do you?

              • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                7 days ago

                Well they’re literally illegal in the US, so I’m pretty SOL regardless, but even if they have designs on the rest of the world, Apple and Google have several million apps’ worth of a head start. We’ll see if Huawei can do what Samsung and Palm/HP couldn’t.

                • ZDL@lazysoci.al
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                  6 days ago

                  Apple has priced itself way out of most of the world’s market. And Google … well, let’s just say that its current trajectory will make leaving its ecosystem viable and desirable for most people within five years.

                  • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                    6 days ago

                    Yes, but I’d expect an Android fork that still runs APKs to be the next move. I think it’ll take quite a while to get every random bank and streaming app on there.