“I get in line to buy shit phones because I’m oppressed, overworked and underpaid”. Alright. Hopefully the corporate overlords will do something about it, then.

The time to support Android was 15 years ago when you could install any OS on any device, side load anything you wanted, root, mod, replace your battery, have full control over your file system, expand your storage, etc. Or 10 years ago, when Google was selling completely unlocked developer oriented phones, offering most of its services for free, opening sources, and actually innovating in fields like computational photography while also researching interesting concepts like modular phones.

If you feel like you can’t vote with your wallet today it’s because the market as a whole has abundantly shown that it really doesn’t give a fuck about any of those things, and it will always give the dominant position to whoever markets more aggressively or more effectively, even if the business models of those companies go against the consumers’ interests.

People in 2007 jumped at the chance to buy a ridiculously overpriced phone with no physical keyboard, a VGA camera without flash, no MMS or 3G support, no apps or customization whatsoever, no expandable storage, no battery replacement, terrible repairability, locked in to proprietary accessories and software, and so on. This, while the competition at the time was putting out cheaper phones with things like OLED screens, professional optics with xenon flashes, dual SIMs, microSD support, the latest connectivity standards, etc.

And when Apple patent trolled, took away things like the headphone jack, or normalized imposing ridiculous costs and taking huge cuts from developers, did people stop buying their products? No, they bought more.

I’m not defending Google at all. Their decline is abhorrent, but it’s a corporation, and corporations will always choose profit over everything else. It’s really naive to think they’ll offer their customers the more ethical option just out of the goodness of their hearts, especially when the market has been taking for granted or even actively discouraging the things that positively differentiated them from the competition.

As gross as Google’s endless enshittification is, I blame the consumers for most of it. People vote with their wallets and they’ve been voting for the locked up walled garden crap option for the past two decades, especially in the US, where there is literally a culture of “ew, you have a green message bubble!” and chasing a status symbol is way more important than things like actual ownership over your devices, digital freedom and customization. And funnily enough, Google’s hardware sales have started increasing steadily since they’ve started copying Apple’s shitty model.