This is more like protesting Walmart while shopping there daily. Reddit directly benefits from the continued traffic.

Congrats! You’re really giving folks all the options!

The app hasn’t been updated but the Play Store block has indeed been lifted. People were sideloading without issue. Perhaps Google intended for the block to only last until launch to prevent reviewers only.

Don’t forget Connect! It’s probably the most complete Lemmy app right now. The “About Instance” function is amazing for getting a list of communities on a given instance with actual working links for subscribing.

For folks curious, !infinityforlemmy@lemdro.id is the Infinity fork community. Dev is quite active :).

If you want privacy-friendly, you really do want something that’s open source. Jitsi is probably your best bet.

Ideally you shouldn’t have to compromise. GrapheneOS without Google is an option.

They also notably ended their dedicated Street View app: https://9to5google.com/2022/11/01/google-street-view-app-shutting-down/.

This has been my feeling lately. The updates aren’t exciting and all of the goodies are tucked away as Pixel exclusives or Google-specific services (e.g., Google Photos).

Especially on beehaw. The quality of discussion is in most cases significantly better than modern Reddit. It all reminds me very much of the earlier days (16 year old reddit account here).

It seems they’re just trying to make it seem intentional when really, they’re just struggling now that their Google Cloud contract has expired.

In 2018, Twitter signed a $1 billion contract with Google to host some of its services on the company’s Google Cloud servers. Platformer reports Twitter recently refused to pay the search giant ahead of the contract’s June 30th renewal date. Twitter is reportedly rushing to move as many services off of Google’s infrastructure before the contract expires, but the effort is “running behind schedule,” putting some tools, including Smyte, a platform the company acquired in 2018 to bolster its moderation capabilities, in danger of going offline. Engadget, June 11, 2023