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?