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Who Will Steal Android from Google?
AI Notes
Steve wrote this on yet another flight to Jakarta, while the strange mail from Why I Left Google was still coming in: a reader in Pakistan offering to buy him a beer, a Russian at a party informing him "You heff many enemies." The piece itself is loose, jetlagged strategy talk from a self-described "outsider and hobbyist" whose opening disclaimer tells you not to read it at all, and the best evidence in it is personal. He maps Google's engineering snobbery as the "DAG of Disdain," with C++ Search engineers atop Snoot Mountain and mobile devs at the bottom of several totem poles at once, and he explains the $60 LG phone he bought on eBay to learn why his Wyvern game was collecting one-star reviews. (Android has two APIs for clicks on a scrolling list. One of them doesn't work on LG.)
As a forecast it has aged unevenly, in instructive ways. Steve crowned React Native and treated Flutter as a punchline about Google competing with itself; Flutter went on to become the more popular cross-platform stack, native Android outlived the predicted stampede, and Amazon shut down its Android app store entirely in 2025. The call that connected was the one he spent the fewest words on: in-app marketplaces grew into the super-app playbook half of Asia's tech industry chased, Grab included. The final stretch drops the analysis for an open Grab recruiting pitch, signed off with a rideshare joke.
Related listings
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2011
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant
The earlier essay that taught Steve to see the world this way. Platforms is about Google failing to be a platform; this 2018 piece is about Google losing control of its most important platform-channel because everyone else is figuring it out faster.
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2020
Dear Google Cloud, Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You
Two years on, same complaint in a different domain. Where this essay says Google is losing Android because it cannot stop fighting its own developers, the deprecation rant says Google Cloud is losing customers because it cannot stop breaking them. The argument is the same: Google does not love its developers, and developers eventually notice.
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2018
Why I Left Google to Join Grab
The first post in this trio. The Grab post is the personal version of the argument — Steve leaves Google because it cannot innovate; this Android post is the structural version — Google cannot defend its main channel either, for the same reasons.