Who turned up Google’s nazi dial?
Use F-droid.
Google. "We gave you so many years. Not a single bite on the carrot. Here comes the stick. "
What carrot? A carrot is an incentive. Google didn’t embrace the tablet format until very recently, in the grand scheme of things. They haven’t offered devs any special deals that I’m aware of — say a revenue split from the play store or paying them to deliver a tablet version of their app — so they didn’t incentivise devs to focus on Android tablets.
iPads have dominated the market for so long, and remain a fairly predictable and consistent device to develop for, so… why would an app developer have poured time into an app for Android tablets in years past?
So…. Instagram?
I wouldn’t be surprised if the unsaid part is that they’re focused more on productivity apps than social apps, but I could be wrong. Also wouldn’t be surprised if Instagram doesn’t care about getting downranked, given its brand and market awareness somewhat transcends the need to appear in top-apps lists.
Google says this every few years and never follows through.
They have no heart or soul, only brief flickers of “try” followed by “squirrel!”
The reasons for this are actually kinda fascinating (at least in a “root cause analysis of an engineering disaster” way).
The way performance evaluation works at Google very heavily takes into account what things your (and if you are a manager, your team) have delivered recently. Maintenance doesn’t really count, so if you want to get a good performance review (and promotions, not be first to go when it’s redundancy time etc) you have to be doing “new”. You can get away with ongoing evolutionary development of a thing if it’s a product or if it’s visible and important, but the unsexy, unglamorous things like looking after small corners of the developer ecosystem that (until very recently) weren’t strategic priorities is a very good way to kill your career.
