Paired with the Pixel 4a "update of death" it feels like Google is throwing in the towel on smartphones. I don't care about Pixel but I do worry about Android - as flawed as it is, it's still the only viable option for an "open" smartphone. I've been playing around with a Pinephone lately and it's lots of fun but obviously not ready for use as a daily driver.
I use Librem 5 as a daily driver. It's much snappier than Pinephone and it's software is supported by a company unlike Pinephone relying on volunteers. It's not as good as an iPhone but usable for me.
For years, the pinephone was considered an alpha device, it was targeted for only developers to use. Currently it's considered a beta device for early adopters.
So let me give you a more apt comparison. The Libre M is like a Nissan versa, ready to drive off the lot. The pinephone is like a ebike that you have to assemble, weld and program yourself.
I have both, and today you don't have to do anything complicated with Pinephone to use it. It comes with a preinstalled OS and is usable on day one. You can even change the OS by following simple instructions to prepare the microSD card (without knowing what you're doing) and then you just use the phone, too.
> The Department of Justice’s list of solutions for fixing Google’s illegal antitrust behavior and restoring competition in the search engine market started with ... breaking off Chrome, Android, or Google Play as the DOJ’s filing considers
If Google takes the foot off the pedal on mobile, it will leave a gap in the smartphone market wide enough to drive a truck through.
A group of smart folks who worked on Pixel & Android can take voluntary redundancy together and start a company with the tech and their experience.
What a wonderful world that’d be - to be able to buy SOTA devices made by a company that doesn’t also make tracking software that tracks you all over the Internet, and that doesn’t want to show you ads. A company that just wants to sell you a product that you buy with your money.
This is what anti-monopoly regulation is for - we all just forgot during the recent period of lax enforcement.
> A group of smart folks who worked on Pixel & Android can take voluntary redundancy together and start a company with the tech and their experience
How did that work out for Andy Rubin and the Essential Phone?
It takes more than money, experience, and collective brain power to build a modern smartphone of sufficient dependability. Unfortunately, most companies in this space, both new and old, are more likely to shoot themselves in the feet than offer a compelling alternative to the incumbents like Apple and Samsung.
Honestly, it sounds like he really just had poor execution. If the phone I ordered came 6 months late, poor touchscreen, and my email was sold/stolen I'd probably not use that company again.
> leave a gap in the smartphone market wide enough to drive a truck through
I think the opportunity is most likely going to be taken Huawei's HarmonyOS than something like Lineage or Librem.
As such we should consider this almost a-kin to a DeepSeek level threat to international security. Google did a lot to secure our phones [0], and we were lucky their economic incentive forced them to be as open as they were.
It's what Carl Pei did with Nothing phone. They do a great job for such a small team. However their company is still losing money with 500mil revenue. It's almost impossible to compete in this market with the big boys.
May be a paid OS with a 10-15$/year subscription to fund the development might work if enough people are interested, but seeking how the mod ecosystem has stagnated I don't see how will this work.
Would love this, in light of recent decision-making at the bigger companies. I refuse to use Google products when it’s at all possible to avoid them, and would prefer to move away from Apple (for similar but different reasons).
That said, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the current tech ecosystem (where everything is either ARR-driven, or “free”) building an OS that isn’t bloated with tracking and spyware.
This likely means the teaching materials for Android Development will remain at 2020 version (before Compose).
Somebody was paid good Google Salary to make decent Presentation style materials:
https://developer.android.com/teach#teach-a-class only never to be updated... Those were good in 2020 but now not so much.
Sure, active learning is usually better such as Codelabs, but there should be decent presentation style teaching that is updated once a year.
I mean I don't trust Google as far as I can throw a TPU datacenter, but they are promising 7 years of OS updates on Pixel. And so are companies like Samsung. Many others offer 3, and even the low-rent "we have your money... I mean... who dis?" manufacturers are offering 2, so it's not like Android is going anywhere. There are just too many players. Honestly, I wouldn't get a Pixel because they are uninspired devices, not because Google will stop supporting them tomorrow.
What does seem to be happening is that the core "user facing" Android (vs all the AI stuff and Play Services-based apps like Maps) is getting more and more settled as a stack and Google is cutting development staff to reflect that. To be fair, I can't speak deeply as to what's happening under the hood, just the touchy bits.
My phone started with Android 9 and is now on Android 15. 10, 11 and 12 all had (compared to now) larger changes. However, if you held a gun to my head and asked me what has changed with Android 13 and on, my answer would be "stuff seems a little rounder" ...and maybe a new font? But it sorta just feels like a new version of the old font. You just don't need that many people for Android's current evolution rate. Which really sucks for all the folks losing their jobs.
> Not offering people the option to leave in advance was a complaint about how Google handled past layoffs.
Guess we know what’s coming.
Very interesting that this only applies to US based employees. I wonder how long before Google completely moves overseas and drops most of their domestic employees.
Voluntary exits are generally more humane, and have been used across Silicon Valley for decades before layoffs became common, so hopefully it minimizes suffering of layoffs.
Also, I’m surprised the title just calls out Pixel and Android, because this also affects most of their hardware efforts (Fitbit, Nest, Chrome, VR, etc)
Edit: I’ve heard from people there that the buyout is worse than previous rounds of severance from layoffs - namely, no stock vesting
They're not doing "voluntary exits" out of the goodness of their hearts, they're doing it because their accountants determined that the cost of paying employees to quit outweighed the reputational damage of doing another round of mass layoffs.
Of course! But it’s better than randomly laying people off. At least it lets people who are ready to quit take the accounting impact instead of others.
Layoffs cause huge emotional trauma to people who are affected. People often slide into serious mental health issues, financial issues, etc. Often people get laid off while their peers were eyeing the door. This at least allows people to quit and take the heat off their coworkers.
Or, the accountants determined that the overall cost of voluntary exits is expected to be lower than a mass layoff. It's possible that voluntary exits make more financial sense.
"Android (Auto, TV, Wear OS, XR), Chrome, ChromeOS, Google Photos, Google One, Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest."
It's a way to avoid 3% or 5% layoffs. That's a big group. With how fast their AI Labs group is moving, I could see some employees not being fans of the direction this group is taking.
Ugh Google's so frustrating. They make great software and products but throw in the towel on anything that's not immediately profitable since ads have too high a margin and their investors get restless...
I have already taken baby steps to get off Google Photos. Next on my list is my Android TV. I heard Apple will be releasing another home device this fall so I will buy whatever it is. Apple should thank Google for being so ridiculous.
What's your Google Photos replacement? My key use is that it recognises my son and automatically shares all pictures of him with my wife, it's very convenient.
I am using iCloud Shared Photo Library. It automatically shares everything with up to five people. It is a bit confusing because now you have Personal and Shared Libraries. I have not grok it all yet.
Yeah zero percent chance I switch to Apple anything. Their insistence on vendor lock in or making cross platform anything super annoying is a complete non starter for me...
Most of my family is European so Android devices all around, no one has Apple anything.
Voluntary exits are pointless if you're planning to lay off the entire team. It usually means that they're keeping part of the team, and want to make sure that they keep the part that'll actually stick around.
It's most likely an attempt to give low performers (if you received a bad rating for last year) a chance to leave on your own terms before they lay you off.
If I was in that bucket I would definitely take this offer.
Looks like all the large tech companies are doing aggressive stack ranking right now.
The job market is terrible right now. More likely the high performers will take the offer because they believe they have better chances of being rehired somewhere else. Good luck to them though.
Assuming the events are independent, P(you get laid off) x P(you don't find a new job) will always be less than 1.0 x P(you don't find a new job)
If I already had a solid offer somewhere else, I'd take the severance. If I didn't, I wouldn't leave it up to chance, and I can't imagine many other people would.
With only three weeks to make decision, my guess is high performers aren't going to start looking for new jobs now unless they were already looking to begin with. From the wording of the message, it sounds like Google is okay with losing the group that was already looking.
The rules are complex but if a company wants to lay off many people in one ___location they have to give notice in advance and usually choose to just payout that notice time.
Note that they're only offering this to people who work on that program in the US. People outside the US didn't get the offer, implying that the program as a whole survives.
All it implies to me is that labor law outside the US is complex, and Google HR is smart enough not to make this offer in places where it will cause them more problems.
Yes, once you sign on a dotted line your ability to take it back may be limited. "Didn't mean to offer..." or "had a change of mind about the offer's validity period" may it may not cut it.
Well, the local branches know the local laws. HQ doesn't so it'll come up with some goal of a 6% reduction in force that ends up taking 2 years to implement globally because of laws outside the US.
But I mean Google's lawyers don't come up with the plans per-say, they advise on legality.
None of the Android offerings sound good other than Sammy. When I say that I mean that Sammy is the only one with enough clout to withstand the mobile wars. The only one with a large enough mobile fan base to compete against Apple. There is no other Manufacturer allowed in NA that can compete with Sammy; not 1+, Moto, Blu, Nokia, HMD, or LG. Allow foreign diversity in the mobile market an US citizens will have to pay out the nose for the tariffs applied. I think we know that Chinese imports stopped with the 3XL?
I had never heard of the term "voluntary exit" until I heard that the Trump administration is going to do that for federal workers. Is this going to be the new normal?
> “to be deeply committed to our mission and focused on building great products, with speed and efficiency"
I hate this language. It sounds culty. Why can't a job just be a job? Why does everything have to have a god damn "mission"?
It's usually called a buyout. We'll give you N weeks of salary per year of service to leave now. When an employer is in structural decline (like newspapers), you expect a series of buyout offers with declining N until finally there are actual layoffs.
Some places do buyouts to avoid triggering certain laws relating to mass layoffs. There are a bunch of names for buyouts, voluntary exit isn't particularly weird.
Didn't take them long. It's so suspiciously similar it looks like either: the administration requested this type of action, or/ Google took their lead from the administration behaving like Twitter and then decided it's now the acceptable normal.
Either way, have some percentage of 2 million feds on the job market, and some percentage of the Google employees on the job market. Like somebody noted in the Verge comments, Zuckerberg's making a lot of the same sounds.
Q: 'What about the looming “low-performer” layoffs?'
Z: “The right thing to do is just rip the band-aid off. I think, in a lot of ways, it is a nicer thing to do for people who are probably not going to end up making it anyway.”
Elon made this popular with Twitter/X. Offered a voluntary exit in the "Fork in the road" email with a deadline. The message was quite similar, that if you're not aligned with the company's [new] vision, you can choose to leave with severance.
Sure, it's certainly better than layoffs. I don't really dispute that. I'd rather get a severance and I have at least a nominal option about leaving instead of being forced out.
I guess I'm just sick of companies massively overhiring, creating a ton of redundant employees in the process, and deciding to get rid of a ton afterward. We give these corporations so much power in our lives and they treat us like pawns. They control our healthcare and dictate where we live, they should treat this power with the responsibility it deserves.
Well, I guess the root of the problem is that while it's "at-will" employement, neither side is actually expecting the other to leave tomorrow. The company has set goals and etc that it expects you to do for the remainder of the year and you also assumed that it's not going to fire you before you do them.
It is a bit weird that contractually we have no expectations but socially we do.
I don't get the frustration about overhiring. Predicting the future is provably impossible. Everybody is going to get it wrong to some degree. I'd much rather see companies overhire than underhire. At least then the laid off employees get experience and a salary for some time.
I imagine it's either (or both) of the following: job seekers started wanting that in their ads, and people with this way of thinking entered the internal recruitment world.
Pretty common for most big mature companies to do at one point or another as their section of the economy swings up and down. This is probably only new for new big teh companies they have only experienced growth. Cisco has done plenty, and the defense industry does it a lot as contracts wind down.
Way less of a morale hit than layoffs, but it suffers a similar problem to all RIF methods where your high performers say "hmm conditions are that bad you're getting rid of people huh? I guess maybe I will take 6 months my annual salary and go get another job."
>> Employees have until Feb. 20 to enroll in the exit program. Those who volunteer will find out whether they’ve been accepted on March 25, a memo states.
