When I first got into Android (I miss my Nexus 6 T.T ), it felt like I could do so much more with my phone than I can now. I had so much cool automation shit that leveraged stuff like Google assistant voice commands, but now it's shit on so many levels. It goes beyond the user facing side of things; I used to use the app Tasker for a lot of the automation stuff, and over the years, it seems like the dev has been climbing an uphill battle against Google gating off functionality, and generally making things opaque and difficult for developers.

"The fact that Google has that locked down surely violates some EU laws. But I'm sure they wave away the laws because of "financial security" or some other bullshit. "

I don't know as much as I'd like to about the regulatory side of this, but I know that Google and other big tech have done a masterful job of proactively building themselves into systems such that taking action against them is difficult.

I think that's part of why the US antitrust case against Microsoft a few decades ago fizzled out into nothing — even though Microsoft was deemed to have been a monopolist, the big question was how do we remedy that in a way that isn't going to be harmful? The consensus on this amongst people who I respect is that the results of the Microsoft case was woefully insufficient and something that helped to lay the foundations of the big tech dominance that we see today.

You really think that the holy OS can even fit in such a small, restrictive device as a cellphone? Of course not! It needs room to truly achieve transcendence.

I just use the timer on my microwave, I suppose the kitchen is the most likely place you'd want a timer. Unless you were using 5 minute epoxy.