Google has done and is still doing a lot of great things, but recently they have crossed a line.
For myself it began with the shutdown of Google Reader, which was a very useful service for me. The company thought otherwise and wanted us to use Google+ instead, but that doesn’t really cover my use case. I looked around and finally went with selfoss, which works fine but feels a bit slow.
Then the Nexus 5 was released and I ordered one day one… big mistake. The first unit I received had a very bad power-on button. Shaking or even slightly moving the phone caused it to create rattling sounds. Also, the vibration motor sounded as if it was dying already. Turned out these problems were quite common… a sign for perfect QA. RMAing was no problem but the replacement was said not ship before mid-december. Sigh. I got the replacement a few days later and started using the phone. Easily the best Android phone I every owned, BUT…
Sadly Google does not care about open source anymore. On the Nexus 5, the closed source Hangouts has replaced the messaging app and the various other parts of the system (launcher for example) are no longer open source as well. For me this is a big deal, but even those who do not care will notice that Google is now actively fragmenting Android by not adding some KitKat features to the Nexus 4 or Moto X. I had big hopes after the relatively smooth and quick rollout of Android 4.3 but with KitKat Google destroyed this illusion.
Could it get worse? Sure! Google banned the CynogenMod installer from Google Play. I guess it is only a time before other popular root-only apps will follow. Some time ago Google also banned AdAway from Google Play, but thankfully there is F-Droid.
It does not stop here. There is another very sad story here. In a nutshell: Google offers a way to import custom CA certificates in Android but in KitKat, there is a very annoying and misleading warning message about this after every boot. The bug was closed WorkingAsIntended and Google basicly asks us to trust them but not ourselves. Nice.
A way out?
It can be hard to migrate away from Google services but thankfully ownCloud is finally getting into usable shape. I use a pre-release of the upcoming ownCloud 6.0 for files, contacts, calendars and news. The only Google services I still cannot replace are GMail and Maps…
As for Android: I will probably switch to a custom ROM soon and not buy anything from Google Play anymore. In the medium term I hope that Firefox OS will be able to fit my needs.