roneyxcx

There is a dialer api but you need signatureOrSystem protection level, which is why it does not work, unless a user on a rooted phone makes the app a system app. I haven't checked how it is now, but back in S3 days, I had a rooted S3 with Google Phone dialer and it worked fine.

First of all major corporations contribute to Linux kernel and there is very little contribution to a distribution. Why are they doing it? Because they benefit from their hardware being supported by Linux kernel(e.g Samsung contributing to Linux Kernel for SSD drivers) and now they can sell more, they can do this because it works with their business model. That is not the case with smartphones, in the smartphone world they are selling directly to a consumer and they need to do everything they can to differentiate themselves from other Smartphone makers. Mozilla tried the business model you mentioned but it didn't catch on. Lastly you forget to understand the number of apps available on Google Play vs on Flathub. Google Play has ~3.5 Million Apps vs ~2000 Apps on Flathub. We are talking a different scale here

Also speaking about Flathub, Flathub solves the issue of fragmentation by building an entire OS on top of another OS just to avoid the challenges of backwards compatibility. This has implications like huge app sizes because you are basically downloading the runtime and everything it depends on for each app. It works for most people because storage is cheap and can be upgraded at least in PC world. But still you will have issues with RAM because most flatpaks don't share the runtime and you need to need load each runtime to memory and this implications like higher memory usage, slower app start times because you need to load the entire runtime first before even you start the app.

One thing about iMessage is that you can reply and send messages from all your Apple devices. I know the https://messages.google.com/ but the you need to keep it open on your computer for notification to come. Then there is the Facetime video/audio quality, it's miles better than Whatsapp, Google Meet or any other video calling app. You can easily share your screens, you can even start a call on iPhone and transfer the call easily to a Mac or iPad seamlessly without even cutting the call. Also the Whatsapp and Google Meet video call quality is like 140p vs 1080p on Facetime. For the average the user who has never used iMessage and Facetime they will never understand what they are missing but for others it's different case.

If you have any corporate backing wouldn't it turn back into same situation as Android? Maintaining the app store, build tools, making new features, patching vulnerabilities e.t.c all require massive amounts of capital. Why would a company openly take initiative to do that? Meanwhile all others could free ride on it? Also any OEM's coming in and customizing it to their liking and not following the standards because they are not bound too like in Android, wouldn't that cause massive fragmentation. Back in the Symbian days this was the case where you need to customize your app slightly for each Symbian device, which meant you had to have the physical device. I remember back in the back in the day your office would be filled with these devices.

Sony phones used to be sold via carrier, it was making huge losses that is what stopped Sony from selling via carrier. Sony phones are still sold via carriers in Japan and even in their home market they are behind Apple, Google and Sharp for total shipment.

There is a good reason why Sony stopped advertising their phones in US and stopped all carrier partnership it is due to low sales and huge loss from continuing their previous strategy. That cut was the reason why they were able to make some profit in 2020. You can read about it here.

You are saying stopping to cater the enthusiast market is the reason why Android is losing to iPhone for market share and they will lose more when iPhone comes with USB-C. If these enthusiasts where the key to marketshare why would they move to iPhone which is more restrictive? If USB-C is all it needs to sway enthusiasts, what is even the point with Android phones that support SD card and headphone jack? If you look at Samsung Smartphone divisions earnings and profit(from April 2023), it is actually up YoY even when global smartphone shipments have declined. Clearly it looks like they know what they are doing, they are making more profit even with less units being shipped.

What is your source for Sony Xperia line made profit? Are you basing it off from reading other tech blogs?

Well there is no exact way to know exact profit and loss for Smartphone division as they merged it with TV, Audio and Camera division. Only info they give for Smartphone division is their revenue and it is lower than TV, Audio and Camera division. In FY2020 results they mentioned they had a small profit for first time after FY2017, this is attributed to cutting expenses in Smartphone division(Source check FY2020 Financial Briefing). In FY2022 the revenue declined when compared to 2021 (https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/presen/er/pdf/22q4_sony.pdf page16). If you stitch together Smartphone division revenue from past 10 years it's been on steady decline. Based on their earning call and analyst estimate Sony ships between 2-3 million units a year. Meanwhile Samsung shipped 260.9 million and Apple 226.4 million units last year. How can Sony Smartphone division be profitable when they are selling such low number of units, it's hardly enough to amortize the development cost.

Interesting to see even with 24% YoY decline for smartphones, Android shipments fell 38% vs 6% for iPhone. Apple has completely gotten the hardware and software integration right to create whole better than the sum of its parts.

Even Android phones that have retained SD card and headphone jack(Sony Xperia 5 IV) are not doing any better. People in Android communities talk about retaining these features and they would only buy phones with these features. Yet when you check smartphone shipment data it is showing otherwise, phones that have removed these features are selling more.

What does China having 1.4 billion people mean to Google? nothing, because they have chosen not to do business in that country. So the argument is moot. Even people in China who use VPN, install Google Play store on their phone to access banned apps in China. BTW there are 3 billion 30 day active android phones with Google Play. If you take biggest Android appstore in China it doesn't even have 500 million 30 day active users.

You can access it by going to https://assistant.google.com/tasks

How so? If the alternative app stores where better all OEM's would have flocked to it. Samsung would have completely dropped Google Play and would exclusively only support Galaxy Store. The only market where OEM's use alternative app store is China, because Google doesn't run Google Play in China. Android being open source means anyone can develop an app store and there is nothing stopping anyone. OEM's continuing to use Google Play is because they get access to millions of apps and ad revenue from Google and none of the other app stores can provide that as of now, except in China.