And just like that, all G Pay branding on every store window, door, or register is deprecated. I think they forgot how to make products.
There’s a reason Apple sold 7 of the most-sold phones in America last year. They all have the latest OS available, have security patches for years to come, and use the same first-party apps. I beginning to think that Apple isn’t necessarily doing anything specifically innovative, they just aren’t constantly fucking with their customers (though they do still fuck OVER their customers regularly).
Apple doesn’t invent new products; they take good ideas that others did poorly and do them well.
I don’t believe that. I don’t think Apple innovates constantly, or that they are the most innovative, but they have their moments (Touch Bar, gigantic touchpad, one of the first laptop manufacturers to have insane display resolution, one of the first to take mobile audio quality seriously, Apple silicon, Vision Pro - which is NOT the same as Google Glass or HoloLens, AirPods).
That’s how they beat competition: by innovating in small-ways.
They didn’t make the first Laptop, but they innovate in ways like high-quality display and trackpad, and having a touch-bar.
They don’t always do it well. Touch-bar and pressure-sensitive trackpad have been hit-or-miss features.
AirPods weren’t the first Bluetooth earphones, but Apple managed to make them wildly popular.
Vision Pro is … honestly I’m not sure where they’re going with it. I think the most similar competing product is the Facebook/Meta/Oculus “Quest”, but that focuses on running games while the Apple Vision emphasizes anything but games.
It’s true, Apple stole ideas so much there is a term for it among the dev community: Sherlocking .
One of the most famous sherlocking case is Apple removing FlickType citing compliance with apple store guidelines, only to launch a similar app later: https://twitter.com/keleftheriou/status/1437845736951992321
“one of the first to take mobile audio quality seriously”
Is this referring to iPods? If so, then I agree. Hell, the first gen iPods are super sought after because they can use FLAC audio files. Although Apple has their own “lostless” audio codec now, so idk if it’s that big of a deal.
AirPods? Sure it’s impressive the noice canceling features in such a small package, but Bluetooth audio was nothing new and now they’re required because Apple removed the headphone jack.
I loved my 2017 LG ThinQ because it not only had a headphone jack, but it had a built in audio DAC to provide extra power to my Sennheiser studio headphones and it sounded soooo good.
Apple isn’t necessarily doing anything specifically innovative
I don’t think they have really innovated for quite some time. But that said, they do know their market. They’ve got tons of people in the ecosystem and simply have to maintain them. It’s a lot easier than courting new users.
yeah. google just isn’t a company you can rely on.
Even their search is going to shit (and with that google ads)
The past year, for multiple times i wanted an app, i couldn’t find it on Google Play. The search is utter crap. I had to bing stuff with “google play” as a keyword to find what I was looking for. Ridiculous. In the original Play Store search they give three results that obviously have my search words substituted for more common ones, e.g. “music” instead of “sound”, and give you a few most popular for that, which is of course bullshit, because of course music apps are more popular than sound apps, BUT I DON’T WANT ANOTHER GODDAM MUSIC PLAYER. Then they show some useless random shit in a carousel, like FUCKING GAMES LIKE HEARTHSTONE AND MINECEAFT, WHICH IS THE LAST THING I NEED NOW … finally there is a “show more” button that triggers the actual search FOR THE SILLY SUBSTITUTED WORDS I DIDN’T ENTER, BUT THIS TIME WITH FUZZYNESS ON MAX SO IT DOESN’T EVEN MATCH THOSE ALL THE TIME.
I’m not a fan of MS, but: bing Play Store when?
It’s even affected YouTube.
Individual phones sure, but much like windows vs Mac . There’s way more android devices sold/out there.
The downside is relying on those non Google manufacturers to update those devices.
I wonder how much of that is because Apple doesn’t compete in the sub-$400 market. I was surprised that my parents had a $100 Motorola Android that provided updates for something like 4 years, but yeah, some of the manufacturer’s just give up on even supporting their flagship devices (I see you, LG G4).
At the very least, manufacturers should be required to make their android build files available, even if they are kept in an escrow until the manufacturer stops selling that model (or they go out of business). Most of the phones going to the dump are because no updates are available, even though the hardware is still fine and any individual person (with a little patience) could build the latest release if they had the hardware bin files available.
For what it’s worth, that’s the goal behind GKI (generic kernel image)
It allows Google to update the phone without the manufacturer’s input
Their business is advertising and Android is how they track an insane number of users. Like Chrome, they’ll never kill it, it’s far too valuable to them.
No, the G Pay logo and branding is entirely separate. It is and has always been the indication that you can pay with the Wallet app. Which sucks as far as naming goes, but at least it has been quite consistent.
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Over here. I had no idea that in other countries they did all kinds of fuckery with their branding.
