I mean anyone who would work on or with a google platform certainly isn’t. They’re the least cypherpunk, most bland and corporate, evil tech corp I can think of that makes consumer hardware outside of MAYBE Meta.
It's known that iOS is the best platform to make money and targeting iOS makes more sense because of that. They probably have an idea of how much they're willing to spend to fight Apple on this because if they win it will be huge for them and they stand to make more than releasing on Android. This is also putting them directly into the news and will reach those Android people so it almost doubles as a genius marketing campaign to fight Apple. I highly doubt they see all this as a waste of money and time and I can see them fighting Apple until they are forced to release an Android app to recoup the money they've lost.
Android users are notorious for not spending money (IIRC Apple users spend double the amount of money on subscriptions vs Android users) and it's unlikely Android users would tip content creators, or even watch the content they're putting out there.
Android (more strictly, AOSP) is an open source linux based operating system that can be used standalone with no google shenanigans whatsoever. I don't like google either, but at least I can use whatever software I want on my machine. To say android is as restrictive or more restrictive than Apple is to be disconnected from reality. To say that using Android is less cyberpunk than using a completely vertically integrated system like the iPhone with it's thousand dollar accessories because "evilcorp" is absurd.
Sure. It’s nice to have. I absolutely give google (limited) props for ASOP. Tho it’s “open” in mostly the “you can see & download the code” sense, not the “we’re open to contributors from the community” sense, but still… it’s great they did that.
But it doesn’t make using the “open” software that’s completely controlled by the giant corporate empire any more “cypherpunk”, does it?
A little more, yes. Of course, ideally, I'd love a BSD mobile operating system that runs TUI applications I made myself. But it's a world of compromise, so I compromise.
From my phone (in Minecraft), I run an IPFS node, I communicate over distributed encrypted channels, I share files over BitTorrent, I probe networks, I zap people on nostr, I do all sorts of things the big powers would rather me not be doing, even though they aren't necessarily illegal. I can run literally any sort of software that I like, period, with nobody's permission or even knowledge of the fact. In computing, I take into consideration absolutely nothing that these corporations would prefer that I do. That's pretty cypherpunk, even if I do it all without google explicitly giving me an AMOLED black theme in their operating system. I use one of those too anyway.
