Buying Android phone is increasingly just the entry fee for Google’s AI ecosystem.
The direction of travel is clear: Google is pushing AI harder and harder to redefine its ecosystem and bring new, powerful features to users. Android’s core OS remains free, but Google increasingly appears to view it less as a product and more as a delivery mechanism for its AI services. As those services become more central to the modern smartphone experience, many of the platform’s most ambitious features are also becoming subscription products.
They’ve embedded it into everything, so the next step will be to make everything virtually unusable without the AI subscription. You won’t have a choice if you continue using Google Android devices.
Just in time, several alternative OSs are starting to come of age where they’re actually usable for most. Google will push users right into their hands.
The next few years in Androidland ought to be interesting.