Google removed “Ok Google with the screen off” (made the toggle disappear, replaced with the option to allow its use in apps) on my Moto Z Play via Play Services updates and later advertised it as a Pixel-exclusive feature. (this was when the Pixel 1 was new)
Their support threads were ended curtly with statements of the phone not supporting the feature which I guess was technically true now that they changed it. (but no, the hardware always supported hotwords)
Never got that feature back and I bailed. For the ups and downs, I’m glad Apple doesn’t do that, instead omitting or handicapping new features for older devices. Of course not the best but yeesh, at least I don’t have to worry about “Hey Siri” being pulled to promote the iPhone 20 yet…
I don't think Apple will need (or want) to do anything "malicious" since Apple is implementing RCS the standard which between the carriers and Google mismanaging and fragmenting messaging for years - see: X carrier phones can only send RCS messages to X carrier phones, Google's implementation is not the RCS standard and is partially proprietary - it'll take a while to get S.S. RCS, The Standard steered right.
I hope Apple's involvement is ironically a kick in the butt to get everyone on the same page and get a standard rather than the current "Google iMessage" solution.
Not a direct answer but for a while I had iTunes Match as a companion service which could be an imperfect workaround to get your hands on 256 Kbps AAC versions. (if it matches, which can’t be manually done)
I bailed when it glitched on a couple songs and syncing broke for a while. Direct iTunes sync hasn’t let me down since but it was nice while it lasted and the Matched songs I had are still kicking.
Of course it requires using iTunes and paying for that $25 for a non-guaranteed quality boost.
I’ve been firmly in iPhone-land quite a while and dabbled only a bit since my phone-switching days so my current perspective will be possibly dated and definitely from someone on the outside, casually following what’s new in Android but I did have a great time bouncing between platforms back in the day. (RIP webOS, BB10 and Windows Phone)
I had a Moto Z Play back in the day (that battery life but like that and the Priv it replaced, a bit big for my taste) and I ditched it when a then-critical feature to me: “Ok Google with Screen Off” was removed around the time Google Assistant and the Pixel 1 was rolling out. It was a Play Services and/or Assistant/Google Now update that removed the option from settings, I uninstalled them to keep it temporarily and when I looked it up, all I could find was a curt official “the feature is not supported” response on some support board. I knew the Snagdragon-whatever chipset it had supported it, and I was using it just fine in the past - it felt like gaslighting, I saw people throwing around the “your battery life would suffer” excuse or that it was never supported despite it being the time when chipset support for hotwords when sleeping like Hey Cortana, Hey Siri were a notable feature and the Z Play had it.
Imagine my reaction when I see that feature being advertised as a Pixel exclusive(? At least it was advertised as a Pixel feature) so that was it.
in hindsight, Google’s shenanigans to promote their own in-house projects over Android as a whole seems pretty in-character now. Even as iOS features aren’t as big like “ooo iOS’s facsimile of multitasking!” there’s still the “that’s neat” or small QoL moments coming out like auto-deleting 2FA texts when they’re used. And I just don’t seem to see any of that in recent releases. I saw “AI color themes!” and a new time layout? and I’m not shortchanging the features already there like holding volume down to mute, but it just feels like they’ve decided base Android is good enough and slowed down or stopped in favor of figuring out whatever exclusive Pixel features and what to keep from the non-Pros.
But with the move of so many things to Play Services, are features still coming out that way outside of the usual point release?
I believe the iPhone uses a basic read-only protocol to access media. (MTP?) You can use iTunes to add files to the iPhone but that's not FOSS. I personally use Photosync, you might like that for wireless photo transfers.
I’m glad that this is finally put to rest. I ditched iCloud in protest of this but came back after Advanced Data Protection came along.
Although now I just send my photos to my PC directly now (Photosync) and copy files with iTunes since iCloud Drive (on Windows) kept breaking and also ballooning it’s logs to absurd sizes. So I’m just paying for cloud backups and message storage.
I hope they get reamed and I recommend people avoid Hyundai/Kia (although note that while technically separate entities, they do share a LOT of engineering and usually work together) since it seems that while they make nice cars on paper and I enjoy mine in a vacuum, there always seems to be some fatal flaw lurking whether by poor engineering or dumb penny pinching/corner cutting. I'm a car dork and while I was comparing everything before settling on buying my affected Sorento, I never once thought to ask "does this car include an immobilizer and have an easy to defeat ignition lock?" and neither did my parents. Even Nissan included immobilizers on their cheapest models a decade ago.
Google removed “Ok Google with the screen off” (made the toggle disappear, replaced with the option to allow its use in apps) on my Moto Z Play via Play Services updates and later advertised it as a Pixel-exclusive feature. (this was when the Pixel 1 was new)
Their support threads were ended curtly with statements of the phone not supporting the feature which I guess was technically true now that they changed it. (but no, the hardware always supported hotwords)
Never got that feature back and I bailed. For the ups and downs, I’m glad Apple doesn’t do that, instead omitting or handicapping new features for older devices. Of course not the best but yeesh, at least I don’t have to worry about “Hey Siri” being pulled to promote the iPhone 20 yet…