Although the result is the least worst IMO for independent software developers (and does make some sense) it shows how dysfunctional the US-led tech industry actually is.
Java was a good idea 10-20 years ago and I suspect it was chosen by Google to lower the learning curve for apps developers, but all that has now led to is slow laggy devices vulnerable to insecure crapware, the ecosystem is fragmented across manufacturers far worse than even Nokia and others managed with Symbian (which was advanced for its time) and much development effort is focused on this shite and advert delivery rather than making them reliable / effective communications devices (which is incidentally also why Oracle is struggling in the first place, I had to work with a lot of Oracle based systems during my Government service which had a Java front end bolted on to a 1970s proprietary Unix mini/mainframe style UI)
I only use my Android devices (both given to me by a work colleague as they were already obsoleted by Samsung) for experimenting with things like NFC tags, monitoring cell site info, an app that links to a Bosch rangefinder (for building plans etc) / listening to Radio Maria or watching EWTN.
Its interesting though not entirely surprising given the current global situation to note that large European companies as well as two religious organisations (which both rely on donations) value privacy and security much more than US developed “cooler” apps aimed at “young people” (the wifi scanners often don’t even offer an ad-free version these days)
Apple devices are IMO way too expensive and not as physically robust as other manufacturers (in my line of work you are almost certain to drop your phone on the deck of somewhere like a comms or plant room with a hard floor), deliberately made incompatible with much other equipment even for simple tasks such as transferring photos and FFS even the Windows phones (which I think are coded using C#) and original Nokias are quicker in operation particularly for telephone calls, messaging and taking photographs.
They also are far better at switching between European languages or allowing you to easily use European video formats with 25 frames per second. If I try to photograph a random animal such as a bird or cat with an Android phone it has often moved out of range long before the camera app even starts up or the picture is blurred as the autofocus can’t react quickly enough to the fast moving creature – quite a few folk who had switched to using a phone instead of carrying around a small compact digital camera have noticed this and it was one reason that Windows phones were quite popular in some parts of Europe though it was Nokia who originally put decent cameras in phones.
If the “new Nokia” (an FI startup working with Foxconn) isn’t able to match this I am seriously considering going back to using a small Japanese compact digital camera, if these are even still made nowadays (as recent ones have wifi anyway and link to cloud services so should work with a mobile used as a LTE broadband “hotspot”)
