It would be depressing for Android to be our best hope. An OS built by a company that gets most of its revenue from advertising will be subject to the whims of Google's customers, which are advertisers, not people like me.
And you can see this:
1) The market is strongly biased towards ad-supported aps. Who benefits? Google. Whose data is passed to the advertisers? Mine.
2) All of Google's ad-supported services are preinstalled on the devices.
3) Android handsets must be activated before use. I've paid for the hardware, but it's useless until I give more data to Google.
Google's business model is giving away cool stuff in return for milking you for information. I can't believe people think that this is "free" or "open".
If you buy the right hardware, you can get rid of all of the Google stuff if you want.
Also, it is open source, so you've got a very good base to fork from to make something of your own, should you so choose. I think we'll see more of that in the future.
Sure, Google adds some stuff on top, but I think that's a small price to pay for all the free stuff you get underneath, which is more than enough to build your own Google-free system should you choose.
And you can see this: 1) The market is strongly biased towards ad-supported aps. Who benefits? Google. Whose data is passed to the advertisers? Mine. 2) All of Google's ad-supported services are preinstalled on the devices. 3) Android handsets must be activated before use. I've paid for the hardware, but it's useless until I give more data to Google.
Google's business model is giving away cool stuff in return for milking you for information. I can't believe people think that this is "free" or "open".