I think they're just have choice paralysis. There's too much stuff on Android, and picking something is really rather anoying.

Something like a Gallery. There's probably a 1000 galleries on Play Store, 50% of them are "my first app", that display a fullscreen ad every other photo.

You have to know what you want, research it, then get it. Non-nerds don't really care about that.

My guess. I'm a nerd who does care about all that.

I will confess I used Google podcasts for years not realizing that the FOSS alternatives were MASSIVE improvements.

Antennapod can do that. You can define the sort order per show.

Pocketcasts fixed that a while ago. You can set the sorting of episodes for each podcast and then it plays in that order.

Are you implying that the average user doesn't know how to install an app? My 80 yo parents do that on their samsung tablet.

No need to trust any higher authorities, whatever that means

That's half-true. No adults I voluntarily associate with care what brand of phone anybody else has in theory, but a lot of the iPhone owners are vehemently unwilling to install any third-party messaging apps. That means:

• Messaging about anything where security is important is a problem. Most people don't have big secrets, but sending things that could be used for identity theft isn't terribly rare.
• Exchanging high-quality media is impossible.
• People will exclude non-iPhone users from group chats because falling back to MMS is a bad experience for everyone.

Is that your biggest concern about a tech company? Id be happy for marketing departments to he shut down and the money redirected to make better/cheaper products.

While Google sucks now and has for a while, in their early days they have demonstrated that marketing is not all it takes to make innovative, successful products.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Apple obsession with marketing has created fanboys that spend the night queuing up to be the first to get the latest iPhone, and that don't question the technology or ethics (or anything) behind the flashing toy that they crave. Good for the executives and the shareholder but as a customer?

Other options are Fairphone, Volla, Murena - or flashing "vanilla" custom ROM's on phones other than Pixels - or using Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, Mobian, Droidian or Sailfish OS.

Its kinda ironic that google pixel is the only phone with decent secirity hardware and an unlockablw bootloader.

Buy a second-hand Google Pixel.

They would make a lot more money on that purchase if it’s vanilla android though. Yes, you’re spending money on the hardware, but is Google really known for making bank on just hardware sales?

1. Buy an old Xperia 10 III.
2. Flash SailfishOS there
3. ???
4. Profit

buy a used phone